MOVIES
The heavily anticipated “Nomadland” finally arrives.
“I’m not homeless,” says Fern at one point early in “Nomadland.” “I’m just houseless.”
That fine distinction is what director/writer Chloé Zhao’s exquisitely wrought character study of a woman made itinerant by life’s cruelties and a shape-shifting economy explores so beautifully. Based on Jessica Bruder’s award-winning, nonfiction bestseller about living among Great Recession-era modern-day nomads — those who choose to live in RVs, trucks, vans and cars, picking up odd jobs along the way to keep body, soul and vehicle together — the contemplative “Nomadland,” opening Feb. 19, whispers instead of shouts its grievances about contemporary American life and is all the more powerful for it.
The film takes place in the wake of the very real 2011 shuttering of the U.S. Gypsum Corp. mine and drywall factory in desolate Empire, Nev., a company town suddenly turned into a husk of a city as its residents/ employees are scattered to the desert winds. It’s a big blow to Fern (an exceptional Frances McDormand), who’s still silently reeling from the death of her husband, Bo. She has lived much of her adult life in Empire, having moved there for Bo’s job at the plant, and with no children, close family or work, she finds herself rudderless.
Too poor to retire and, as the woman at an employment office tells her, having no real skills, she packs her van and hits the road, getting seasonal work at an Amazon warehouse where she meets Linda (Linda May), who introduces her to the concept of being a nomad and tells her about the upcoming Rubber Tramp Rendezvous — a sort of a low-key Burning Man for nomads — in Quartzsite, Ariz. From there, Fern finds herself increasingly unmoored from the idea of having a permanent home, despite the entreaties of her well-meaning sister (Melissa Smith) and even one of her fellow nomads, Dave (David Straithairn), who seems to have a bit of a crush on her.
What follows is a portrait of a restless life, populated not with big events but a growing appreciation for a world not attached to things and stuff but to a sense of adventure.
As she did with her last film, the moving “The Rider,” Zhao chooses to populate “Nomadland” largely with nonactors. With the exception of McDormand, Straithairn and Smith, the cast is mostly made up of people from the nomadic subculture playing fictionalized versions of themselves. That might seem like a risky choice, but it works wonderfully, lending an authenticity that would be hard to match with a crew of Hollywood neophytes playacting as nomads.
McDormand herself is a wonder. Freed from the eccentricities and mannerisms of her characters in the likes of “Fargo” or “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” she displays an understated naturalism that results in her best performance.
While it’s impossible to remove “Nomadland” from the political temper of the times — the book was regarded as a rebuke of a system in which elderly people feel forced to keep working at temp jobs where some “walk 15 miles on concrete floors, stooping, squatting, reaching and climbing stairs as they scan, sort and box merchandise” — and it is set in remote, rural Red-State America, Zhao stays away from any grand political statements. As she showed in “The Rider,” a film that takes place in the world of young rodeo riders, Zhao has the ability to reflect the universe of her hard-scrabble characters without looking down on them or becoming preachy.
But America itself is a silent character in “Nomadland,” its landscapes gorgeously shot by Zhao and her cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, and its beauty mirrored by the haunting score from composer Ludovico Einaudi. (And, with travel off the agenda for so many right now, “Nomadland” is a timely reminder of what’s out there, waiting to be explored.)
As Fern traverses the Badlands and the flatlands, the deserts and the mountains, she begins to imagine the possibilities of an existence untethered to what had previously kept her in place. Fern may be houseless, but she’s coming home.