Memoirous

Nomadland Director, Chloé Zhao For viewers of a certain age, this film will scare the bejezus out of you. Nomadland highlights the tenuous thread keeping older Americans from completely unraveling. Starting with the Great Recession of 2009 up to today when many of those same people decided to storm the American capital, there is a segment of society that feels forgotten and marginalized. Unheard. Desperate. The character of focus in the film, Fern, is laid off from her job in a gypsum sheetrock factory in Empire, Nevada, a place she remembers as being on the fringe of the desert, where her house looked out onto . . . nothing. Desert. She loved it. And, she loved her husband. She is grieving so much. A facet of most everyone on her same journey, a slew of losses that they are trying to reconcile or run from. Fern decides, or else fate has decided for her, to convert an econo-van into a tiny house and sets out to make a living as an itinerate worker. She works the seasonal shift at...