McDormand shines in study of America the forsaken
Here’s a beaut. Writer-director Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” offers a remarkable experience anytime but especially now, when it can be so weirdly difficult to recall life in America a few years ago. The economic straits depicted here are like bulletins to the future.
Frances McDormand stars in this forlorn yet defiantly hopefilled sigh of a story. It’s a slice of poetic realism written, directed and edited by Zhao, who made “The Rider,” a drama on the edge of documentary and what many of us considered the finest American picture of 2018. The script comes from material and subjects in Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction account “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.” McDormand is in nearly every scene as Fern, a widower in her early 60s. She has never done subtler or truer work.
Fern uproots her life and herself after her late husband’s gypsum plant folds, thereby folding up the town of Empire, Nevada, for good. “I’m houseless,” she says to her former students (she worked for a time as a substitute teacher) in a grocery store encounter. It’s not the same thing, she notes, as “homeless.”
The film charts Fern’s life as a nomad, living out of her modified van, working the seasonal shifts at Amazon fulfillment centers, beet processing plants or as part of a janitorial crews at an RV park, in a job set up by her fellow migratory nomad, Linda May. That latter role is played by Linda May, who is not famous, or a professsional actress, but who is wholly effective in front of a camera.
Throughout “Nomadland,” real people crisscrossing the country in their vehicles, finding home and connection where they can, ease onto the screen as fictionalized versions of themselves. Zhao’s ensemble combines familiar actors (McDormand and David Strathairn, equally effective as her friend, potential lover and fellow traveler) with real-life nomadic personalities. In Quartzsite, Arizona, Bob Wells runs a how-to RV camp, and his Santalike countenance fills the frame every time he gets a close-up.
Zhao’s partner and cinematographer, Joshua James Richards, shot Zhao’s previous films, “The Rider” and “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2015). He does far more than capture postcard-worthy sunsets. His knack for catching people in their newfound element is extraordinary. As “Nomadland” unfolds, Fern reveals a bit more of her story, while her present-day life, after the fallout of the
Great Recession, proceeds from
Nevada to Arizona to the Dakota Badlands to the Pacific coast.
On a first viewing, it feels to me a shade less wonderful than “The Rider,” with fewer sharp edges and a tad more contrivance. Small matters. While there’s little or no outright expression of religious faith in “Nomadland,” Zhao and company have given us a glancing but evocative state-of-thenation character study. In its own spiritual fashion, Fern’s story becomes one about the character of a nation, and an America desperately searching for the ribbon of highway (to quote Woody Guthrie) to take us all the way home.
MPAA rating: R (for some full nudity)
Running time: 1:48
Where to watch: In theaters and streaming on Hulu on Feb. 19