‘Nomadland’ stirs controversy

Some say film left out harshest Amazon critisism

A quietly poetic drama about people living all but invisibly on the margins of American society, director Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” has made a considerable amount of noise — and been anything but a fringe player — in this year’s topsy-turvy awards season.

Since its premiere last September at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top Golden Lion prize, “Nomadland” has racked up virtually every award in its path, from the Golden Globes to the Producers Guild Awards to this past weekend’s BAFTAS. Heading into the Oscars on April 25, the Searchlight Pictures release is nominated for six awards, including best picture and director, and is widely considered the film to beat.

But being the frontrunner brings with it an added level of scrutiny, and “Nomadland” has come in for its share of criticism since its release in theaters and on Hulu in February. Even as many have praised the film for its sensitive, authentic depiction of itinerant workers, others have griped that it glosses over the harsher realities of the modern gig economy and, in particular, what it’s like to work in an Amazon warehouse and participate in the company’s seasonal Camperforce program.

In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Propublica reporter Alec Macgillis, author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-click America,” argued the film, which is centered on the experience of a nomad named Fern, played by Oscar winner Frances Mcdormand, sidesteps what he says are dehumanizing and potentially injurious working conditions at Amazon. “The visual power of the film and its emotional core, Fern’s grief over the loss of her husband and her former life, occupy the audience’s attention, not Amazon’s problems,” Macgillis wrote. “One could easily come away from the movie having a benign view of the toll Amazon takes on its workers, including the temporary ones.”

Critics see the film, adapted by Zhao from journalist Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century,” as a missed opportunity that omits the nonfiction work’s most damning passages. Others counter that the critically acclaimed picture is a stirring character study, not a work of muckraking journalism. (Zhao and the film’s producers were not made available to comment for this story.)

The debate has gained traction in recent weeks amid a closely watched and ultimately unsuccessful unionization effort by workers at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The union push highlighted what many Amazon critics say are punishing working conditions in the company’s warehouses, with workers relentlessly driven to perform monotonous and physically taxing work at an ever-faster rate in order to hit algorithm-mandated targets, subjecting themselves to potential repetitive-motion injuries — criticisms that Amazon has long pushed back against.

“I thought there was a lot about the film that was very beautiful but it left more than a bitter taste in my mouth,” says Tim Shadix, legal director of the California-based nonprofit advocacy organization Warehouse Worker Resource Center, who points to a 2019 study that found that the injury rate at Amazon warehouses was more than twice as high as in the general warehousing industry. “I felt like the portrayal of all of the work in the film, but particularly the Amazon work, paints a very misleading picture of what our economy is like. It shows Amazon as a place to make money and enable someone’s personal journey, not really dealing with how dark it is that you have companies that are taking advantage of often senior people who should be retired but, because of economic circumstances, are working in horrifically dangerous jobs.”

While researching her book, Bruder spent a week working in an Amazon warehouse in Texas and witnessed some of its potential dangers. She writes of one 70-year-old Camperforce worker, Chuck Stout, who was stationed near a conveyor belt when a box flew off and knocked him down, causing him to hit his head on the concrete floor. After Amazon’s in-house medics determined he hadn’t suffered a concussion, Stout was sent back to the job that had him walking some 15 miles a day.

The book’s central character, Linda May, who plays herself in the film, developed a debilitating repetitive-motion wrist injury from operating a handheld barcode scanner for hours every day, with pain radiating along the entire length of her arm. Working through the Christmas rush, Bruder writes that Linda May felt like “a cog in the world’s largest vending machine.”

None of those hazards are seen in the film, however, in which Fern is shown packing boxes and placing products on shelves in an Amazon warehouse, declaring at one point that the gig is “great money.”