Nomadland (2020, Dir. Chloé Zhao):
Nomadland is all about landscapes: cracked wintry roads in a desolate Nevada town, the pinkish blush of sunset in the South Dakota badlands, windswept California coastlines battered with gentle rain. More importantly, Nomadland is about the landscape of human faces—the weathered visages of people who have chosen life on the road, either fleeing or forsaken by conventional society. Taking its cue from the non-fiction book of the same title, Chloé Zhao’s film is a poetic investigation of these landscapes and faces, a road movie without a destination in mind.
Set during the 2011 recession, the narrative follows recently widowed Fern (Frances McDormand) as she ekes out a living with seasonal work at an Amazon shipping plant when she’s not roaming the countryside in her beat-up van. Hair shorn to an unruly thatch, self-reliant and proud (“I’m not homeless, I’m house-less. Not the same thing, right?” she answers a curious questioner), Fern is guarded by nature, but soon she befriends a fellow worker (Mary Lou) who encourages her to join a Rubber Tramp Rendezvous of like-minded off-the-gridders, presided over by real-life nomad king Bob Wells. From there she embarks on a wary half-romance with fellow wanderer David (David Strathairn), connects with a longtime traveler whose life is on the wane (Swankie), and flirts every so often with the possibility of settling down for a “normal” existence with friends or relatives, all of these incidents underscoring the film’s aim of portraying life on the fringe.
Typically, tales of impoverished folks tripping across the US take their cue from stories like The Grapes of Wrath: dramatic fireworks, clenched outrage, heartbreaking tragedies. While Nomadland the book is both a gritty look at—and paean to—the dispossessed and downwardly mobile, Zhao opts for a more glancing, contemplative approach. While she preserves the book’s overriding empathy for its cast of drifters, she doesn’t hit us over the head about their plight, apart from a few vignettes that hint at the arduousness of day-to-day existence (peeing off the side of the road, cleaning campground toilets as a side-job, searching for money to fix a van breakdown). Melodramatic plot turns or antagonists are avoided: the closest the movie comes to a “bad” character is a hotel security man who politely but firmly informs Fern she can’t stay overnight in the parking lot. Instead, Fern’s journey is presented as series of episodic anecdotes that takes us on a tour of bleakly beautiful locales, even as they give us glimmers of insight into her character. Wearing her cheeriness like armor, friendly but loathe to make friends, irate when called out on her itinerant lifestyle, Fern might be a hard-luck case, but she owns her situation with unfussy nobility.
Shot with a combination of tidy framing and hand-held camera movement, the images of Nomadland have a rough-hewn beauty, and thanks to McDormand and the other actors (mostly real-life people who play themselves), the proceedings have an easygoing, naturalistic feel, even when things get over-scripted. When Fern reveals early on that she used to be a substitute teacher with a knack of rattling off Shakespeare monologues, is there any doubt she’ll recite a Shakespeare sonnet at a climactic moment? Fortunately McDormand is so good at being un-showy and in the moment that she escapes this bit of dramatic contrivance unscathed.
“I’ve met hundreds of people out here and you don’t say a final goodbye. I just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.'”
— Bob Wells, Nomadland
Ultimately, Nomadland plays like a variation on Terrence Malick’s gorgeous ’70s movies Badlands and Days of Heaven, minus the pretension and ambition. Like Malick, Zhao supplies plenty of visual sheen, but she prefers to imply rather than preach, resulting in occasional bits of vagueness. “We gladly throw the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar on,” Bob Wells warns his fellow wanderers; we scan Fern’s face as she takes in this statement, and await a reaction that never arrives. For someone who worked for “The Man” her entire life without much complaint and now slaves away at Amazon to earn her bread, surely she must have an opinion, but she (and Zhao) aren’t telling. (Perhaps they aren’t allowed to tell, in exchange for Amazon permitting Zhao to shoot scenes in its plant, in which workers are depicted as industrious and generally happy.)
That omission of broader perspective characterizes Nomadland in general. For all its gentle character shadings and gestures towards chronicling the nomad life, the movie is essentially a one-hander, its viewpoint matching Fern’s: stubbornly self-sufficient, treating roaming existence as a valid lifestyle choice. While Zhao’s refusal to demonize or sensationalize the dispossessed is refreshing, she’s less interested in pulling back the curtain on their milieu or pondering universal themes than digging into Fern’s particular foibles and quirks. In the process, dramatic complications all but disappear: Fern encounters nice folks, hears a few stories, contemplates life on the road, and simply moves on in a hardscrabble state of grace, no more tied to truly threatening trials and travails than she is to a fixed abode. Meanwhile, a potentially catastrophic hospitalization is shrugged off, and problems with money are solved by sympathetic relatives. While the film no doubt draws inspiration from Henry David Thoreau and his need to escape the “quiet desperation” of circumscribed living, the proceedings could have benefitted from a little more desperation.
Without much of a plot to disturb the procession of lovely images and McDormand’s sturdy performance, Nomadland winds down with a final visit to an abandoned industrial plant and home that’s meant to mark a farewell to the past, and an embrace of an open (if uncertain) future. It’s a passage that’s more of an afterthought than an epiphany—but maybe it’s too churlish to wish for more conventional drama from a movie that takes such great pains to humanize its characters and settings. In this day and age, any show of empathy at all feels like something that should be applauded; it’s probably best to approach Nomadland as one approaches a love letter or tone poem, leave real-world questions behind, and simply let those landscapes and faces sink in. ■
