While on the face of it Nomadland seems singularly the story of McDormand’s character Fern and her doughty spirit; it actually maps a thriving American sub-culture of van-dwellers, choosing to live alone on the road.
A still from Nomadland
Nomadland
U/A: Drama
Director: Chloe Zhao
Cast: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn
Rating: ***1/2
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Given the quantum of content hitting us with the speed of light every minute, how long must it take to anoint a film/series as a classic already — having survived the strands of time to make it so?
I think 13/14 years is an adequate distance to reflect from. Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), in case you’ve re-watched it lately, remains the classic story of disillusionment of youth, life of solitude, and wanderlust in the wilderness, set in the ’90s the US.
How comparable, for its subject, is Into the Wild to Nomadland? At first, I felt the two films are as different as choices are to circumstances. Frances McDormand — equally naked on screen as super-young Emile Hirsch in Into the Wild — is but an old, single woman in post-recession (2011) America.
Watch Nomadland Trailer
Her husband is no more. The town itself in which she lived with him for decades does not exist. It shut down, because it was a factory township. And that factory doesn’t exist!
She identifies herself as “houseless”. Instead of “homeless”. Driving around by herself, in an RV (recreational vehicle), the wheels guide her, through mountains, national parks and valleys, to the next boondock, that can offer her a temporary job — before she can drive off again!
Could you get used to this so-called unsettled life? That’s the question the film is centred on — allowing for multiple possibilities where her life could go, but never once settling for an answer (for her), that might make you go, “Then why was I watching this all along?”
Not that there is a unique answer for such a question. Depends on who you are. Here’s the thing though. While on the face of it Nomadland seems singularly the story of McDormand’s character Fern and her doughty spirit; it actually maps a thriving American sub-culture of van-dwellers, choosing to live alone on the road. Strangely, in an Easy Rider (1969) sort of way, although in another phase!
I’m told some of McDormand’s co-actors in this film play fictional versions of their real selves. One of whom, Bob Wells, a van-dwelling evangelist of sorts, I intend to read more about. Nomadland is based on Jessica Bunder’s non-fiction account of the same name.
All of which lends this narrative a sense of truth higher than realism — also surveying an America leading up to Trump, dealing with social insecurity, job-loss, and clueless hopelessness.
Or the age-old fact of age itself, and it being a terminal disease, isn’t it — health’s all you got. That, coupled with loss of purpose, or loved ones, or companionship, with only memories to hold on to.
Or even the wish to break free from all of it. You can technically load all that you’ve loved into a frickin’ van. The sub-text is only in the suggestions. At no point does the script linger on any of it, any longer, than it should.
This is the sort of slow-burn meditation on the evening of working-class life that British dramas especially excel at — may I nominate Mike Leigh’s Another Year (2010), and Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016), in particular, as potential classics already.
Chinese-born Chloe Zhao has directed the quintessentially American Nomadland. A reason such movies regularly get made in the US and released in the early part of the year is because they have the Oscars to give the inclusive, independent cinema the global push/platform it deserves.
As I write this, Nomadland has pretty much swept the board with six Academy Award nominations, four of which — best picture, direction, editing, and adapted screenplay — are for Zhao herself. She’s produced, directed, written and edited the film.
Maybe it’s her foreign gaze, but this is an America with its vistas that you rarely encounter in mainstream Hollywood. Likewise the beats and rhythms feel more episodically lived-in as an experience, rather than too formally structured as a screenplay.
Both of which I suspect are ideally enjoyed as immersive moments on the big screen. Which isn’t how I watched this film. Maybe that, or simply the Oscar hype surrounding it, this empathy-generating machine didn’t draw me in to move me to tears; in a way that I thought it would. Perhaps that was intended.
It got me thinking all right. Returning to the detached humanism Frances McDormand as Fern personifies. And almost as an impulse to click on the Eddie Vedder songs, Guarantee, and Society, from Into The Wild, for some reason, to revel in the life of social escapism and tempting wilderness, all over again. That soundtrack, with this gentle film, rightly evokes the same response!
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