The Long and Winding Road
Frances McDormand falls in with a community of middleaged migrants in director Chloé Zhao’s quietly moving drama
Frances McDormand falls in with a community of middle-age migrants in director Chloé Zhao’s quietly moving drama Nomadland.
Imagine a place on the map so tied to its industries that when the work disappears, so does the place. A ZIP code can be, as Chloé Zhao’s new film Nomadland puts it in an opening title card, “discontinued.”: “On January 31, 2011, due to a reduced demand for sheetrock, U.S. Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years.” What happens to the town’s residents? If you need work to live, and if home is meant to be an anchor, who are you without either?
It’s precisely this set of presumptions, with their attitude of liberal concern, that Nomadland deftly and unexpectedly peels apart. Like Zhao’s breakthrough 2017 movie, The Rider, the cast is stacked with nonprofessionals, and for readers of Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, some of the characters we meet will be familiar. There’s Linda May as the still-upbeat Linda, Charlene Swankie as
Swankie, and playing a man named Bob, the sixtysomething internet personality Bob Wells, whose video dispatches on his YouTube channel (CheapRVLiving) have become a dedicated resource for people who similarly live as selfdeclared nomads.
Among them looms a veritable movie star. Frances McDormand plays Fern, a widower from Empire and a relative newcomer to the nomadic life. Her van — her home — is named Vanguard. And for the people in the life she once lived, there’s an assumption of misery to Fern’s fate. “I’m not homeless,” she says to a young woman she once mentored, in a clarifying tone. “I’m just . . . houseless. Not the same thing, right?”
You expect a movie that pivots on that difference to have a winking awareness. Nomadland, though far from joyless, is not a playful film. Fern is, in McDormand’s dependably humane and capable depiction, full of life, memories, and desires that confront her needs. But the poles pulling her to and fro are not purely emotional; like everyone, she moves with the work, packs up when it dries up, commits herself to the long haul of this life. You never sense outright regret, which is key.
But the movie also avoids reducing her to the plot device that a movie star, doing her best to fit in among a mobile working class, could easily become. McDormand has always seemed like the rare Oscar winner who’d be at home in most of our living rooms, rather than distractingly glamorous or magnetic. It works here. She is most certainly what pulls us through the story, a conceit made most explicit when the camera, tracking her from behind, wanders as she wanders. Zhao goes out of her way to anchor Fern in the felt reality of these places. (While filming in the fall of 2018, the writer-director lived out of a van along with the rest of the crew.)
It’s a tenuous cycle, a tenuous life. This is a film full of transitions: The comings and goings of migratory work seasons give it a structural backbone. The friendships that Fern builds across the length of the film are all the more fragile for this. They’re as seasonal as the labor.
For all the majesty and naturalistic realism of its imagery, Nomadland is nevertheless full of sublime, uncanny details that lift it somewhat above the fray: Fern’s camper driving through the tight walls of a mountain tunnel; butterflies alighting on a mirror as she washes her face; Fern, nude, floating in a pool of water. These aren’t elevating, ironic details — they don’t (or shouldn’t) make us feel “better” about Fern’s situation by reminding us that, to invoke a memorable misfire on this subject, life is beautiful.
In fact, one of the prevailing questions of this film — one of the things that catapults it above mere liberal experiment — is the question of choice. At one point, we meet Fern’s family and learn that she’d distanced herself from them long before the economic collapse that left her stranded (in their eyes). “You left a big hole by leaving,” her sister tells her.
A man she meets and remeets over the seasons, David (David Strathairn), becomes something of a new anchor for her. There’s possibility brewing between them.
But he, too, has a choice to make. He, too, has a family willing to take him in. But will he be taken in? Will Fern?
Giving us this lifestyle primarily as a choice might run counter to the overwhelming sense of economic despair that leaves a great many people choiceless and, in terms of politics, voiceless. In Nomadland, however, that choice comes off as welcome complication. The people of this film are united and collaborative in this life; they are also individuals who have their own reasons, their own experiences. If the movie takes any unwelcome shortcuts, it’s in somewhat skirting the often brutal working conditions (in jobs like Fern’s Amazon CamperForce temp gig) that make something like the choice to live this way — and the predilection to divorce oneself from home and family life as we generally conceive of them — harder to imagine. It would have been exhilarating to see a film as rich as Nomadland try.