Nomadland (2020 | USA | 108 minutes | Chloé Zhao)
There is much to reflect on with the film Nomadland. It is perhaps the most critically praised film of the year, the Seattle Film Critics Society named it their best film of the year this week, and for good reason. It is a beautifully constructed work by writer and director Chloé Zhao who adapted it from the 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by journalist Jessica Bruder. After Zhao’s last film, 2017’s The Rider, it was hard to imagine her creating another film on par with that one.
Yet Zhao has done just that and more. She tells the story of a woman, Frances McDormand’s Fern, whose life is thrown into crisis after the Great Recession decimated the town of Empire. The crisis saw the thriving town go from being a home to generations of gypsum miners into a shadow of what it once was. Fern now spends her days living out of her van as a nomad roaming the country. McDormand is absolutely phenomenal, giving an understatedly stunning performance. She is often quiet, spending a good amount of time listening though still speaking volumes in subtle moments. Fern is faced with immense loss and trauma as she must find her own way in a world that does not care about her.
That leaves Fern to wander from place to place, job to job, all captured against the backdrop of expertly captured settings that inspire awe in the mind and body. From the golden hours of sunsets to the enormous redwoods, the gorgeous cinematography makes you feel as though you are standing right there with her through it all. Zhao edits these moments all together in a fashion that is as free flowing as the lifestyle of the nomads themselves. Fern will often appear in a new job or location with little fanfare. It makes for a unique feeling of displacement with no defined setting as Fern moves from place to place in the blink of an eye. The story takes the form of a road movie where the road is less a specific location and more an experiential journey seen through the eyes of a singular person trying to make their own way.
That is where Zhao has drilled into a deep fissure of American society that too often goes ignored in modern cinema. She has once again cast many non-professional actors, something reminiscent from her prior work, to incisive effect. Hearing the monologues and stories of real people sharing their past around a campfire is riveting. You can feel that it is tapping into something authentic about how our modern society punishes those on the margins that are deemed expendable. These are the people society would rather not have to think about.
Zhao refuses to ignore them. Instead, she crafts a story that looks honestly and authentically at their lives. Fern is both the entry point into this world and also the stand in for so many who have lost so much. However much we want to forget, 2008 upended and destroyed countless people’s lives. Fern’s story is just one of those stories. Zhao has delicately captured the etchings of loss and trauma in Fern’s face, which becomes juxtaposed against the beauty of landscapes she begins to roam. The visuals reflect all that loss and a desperate, perhaps futile, search for a future that can resemble all that Fern has lost. It cuts deeply to the soul.
There is a worthy conversation about whether the film engages in “poverty tourism” where the audience gets to look at people on the margins and comes away seeing their struggle as inspirational rather than a societal problem. These types of inspirational stories appear nice on the surface and recall instances of the news romanticizing people sacrificing large parts of themselves in order to just barely survive. These stories are not inspirational and put forth a tantalizing, though dishonest, depiction of reality that can only limit our understanding of a crisis.
Nomadland is not such a film. The scenes of community coming together and supporting each other is what one may initially identify as inspirational though this is not the ending point. Rather, the film opens up a conversation about the struggles these people face on a daily basis. Fern is one flat tire away from potential disaster and there is no romanticizing that. Yes, Zhao shows the beauty in seeing people be there for each other and make a life for themselves. The film is brimming with glimpses of joy. Crucially, she balances it with the immense tragedy that they are all each other have left in an unjustly cruel world which has completely and utterly failed them.
This balance is woven throughout the text of the film itself. In particular, a scene where Fern visits her sister in order to get money for repairs for her vehicle makes this explicit. An argument of perspectives arises when Fern challenges her sister’s friends when they say, quite callously, how “real estate always ends up on the upside.” Maybe that is true for a predatory few, but not for people like Fern who lost everything. When there is a silent moment of tension, her sister attempts to praise Fern by saying she is part of “an American tradition.”
This line has been frequently used in the film’s trailers, devoid of context, which is unfortunate. The scene in context provides a vastly different meaning as the romantic view Fern’s sister provides is not framed as being correct. Instead, Fern quietly looks down and later in a private conversation, pushes back on her sister’s view of her life. It becomes clear that her life is still forever impacted by the pain and loss she has experienced. Zhao does not sugarcoat or neatly package this loss. It is, like modern life, messy and complicated. It is honest and unflinching.
Zhao has indicated she doesn’t want “to just focus on someone who used the road as a means to an end in order to make a social commentary about how bad American capitalism is,” which she said in praise of the power of fictional filmmaking. Nomadland is most definitely not a documentary though it accomplishes what many documentaries could only hope to achieve: it builds a connection with its characters as it takes a compassionate look at their hopes, dreams, struggles, and finds a throughline of empathy that draws you into their world.
However Zhao intends for her film to be read, when you look at the core of Nomadland, you see communities of people who are resourceful and creative because they have to be. The world has left them behind and that their strength is portrayed as admirable doesn’t take away from the underlying reality of how society has failed them. There is so much that is deeply broken with the world that has left them out to dry. They must use their resourcefulness to carve out a life for themselves only because there is nowhere else for them to turn. The road is a harsh place, but it is often all that any of them have left.
To see these characters attempt to pick up the similarly broken pieces of themselves is not a dodge or a papering over of these issues. It only makes it all the more necessary to confront and grapple with these ideas when witnessing the impact it has on real people living real lives. These are lives that Zhao captures with beauty and yes, grace. Importantly, she also looks at them with a profound sadness and creates a steadily burning outrage at what has been taken from them.
When Fern wanders through the ghost town that was once her home, this loss is given shape and form. It is an unyielding look at the ongoing destruction of lives that will continue to occur if the system itself is not fundamentally changed. What happened to Fern and the others she encounters is not an inevitable, natural part of life nor should it be viewed as one. It cannot just be up to people to overcome, even if they can. The strength of our resiliency cannot take away from the fact that the cause of this pain is the culmination of a series of systemic failures.
Zhao breathes life into the human impact left in the wake of this devastation and through her patient eye provides a revelatory reckoning with the pain being wrought by society’s failures. The film does not surrender to them, but is rather a humanistic portrayal of the people who have been left behind to fend for themselves. Nomadland challenges us and presses on the most dire questions of our times. It examines what is left behind in the wreckage of our broken world.
Nomadland is available in theaters and on Hulu beginning February 19. Photo credit: Searchlight Pictures.