‘It’s an utter myth’: how Nomadland exposes the cult of the western
It has been a wild ride for Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’sroving portrait of the US’s rootless modern migrants. Shot for $5m and largely featuring amateur actors, it is the little movie that could: this year’s rags-to-riches story, beloved by the critics and odds-setters alike. The road has been cleared, the gold rush is on, but the Hollywood happy ending feels at odds with the film. As Nomadland steers its westerly course – from the Baftas in London to the Oscars in Los Angeles – it is living a dream that it knows is a lie.
Condé Nast Traveler called it “a love letter to America’s wide open spaces”, which is true up to a point, but this ignores the pathos, poverty and desperation at its core. Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction bestseller, the film bounces Frances McDormand’s hardbitten loner through a modern American badland in which the saloon and the sheriff’s office have been replaced by the RV park and the Amazon warehouse. I would file the film as an anti-western, a wholesale repudiation of manifest destiny, the pursuit of happiness, all the Hollywood snake oil we have long been fed. “Yeah, OK,” Bruder says. “But it’s more complicated than that.” Frustratingly, I think she may be right.
For Bruder, at least, the journey is almost done. She first reported on the US’s “van-dweller” or “workamper” community for Harper’s magazine, which laid the ground for her 2017 book. She is serving as a consulting producer and, from time to time, a spokesperson for the picture as it trundles through awards season. Bruder likens the experience to moving a bucket of water from one place to the next. Lots of responsibility. Lots of potential for spillage.
Nomadland clears centre stage for an invented heroine: Fern, a widow who takes to the road claiming that she is “not homeless, just houseless”, shuttling from one seasonal gig to the next. But the film folds her in with several of the nomads from Bruder’s book, all playing versions of themselves. These include white-bearded Bob Wells, the founder of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR) – probably the largest gathering of nomads in the world – and the no-nonsense survivor Charlene Swankie, who bustles across the RTR’s campsite with her arm in a sling. Linda May dreams of buying a plot of land and building an earthship – a sustainable, self-sufficient home made from natural and recycled materials. Until then, she is stuck with the Squeeze Inn, her 9ft x 6ft (2.7m x 1.8m)