Movie Review: 'Nomadland'

Director Chloe Zhao is fast becoming one of the most reliably fascinating directors on the planet. Her stories are some of the most unique and challenging being told in modern American cinema. Zhao has an eye for detail in character that marks the truly great storytellers. The latest example of Chloe Zhao’s expanding brilliance is Nomadland, a beautifully sprawling story unfolding in the lower economic rungs of society.

The wildly brilliant Frances McDormand stars in Nomadland as Fern, a widow who lives in a van by choice. Fern has options, she could go and live with her sister in a suburb but she chooses life in her van. It’s not glamorous but the little alterations that she’s made to the van have made it her own. It’s the only thing she owns in a world that has become a swirling vortex of change around her while she lived in near stasis in a small town that suddenly no longer exists.

That’s not a sci-fi conceit. You may not realize it, but there are towns in America that simply no longer exist. Fern and her late husband lived and worked in one of those towns until he fell ill and passed away and the town, which was home to a gypsum manufacturing and distribution plant, died from a complete economic and population collapse. Fern is left without a husband and a job and a hometown but not without her desire for independence.

When we meet Fern in this story, much of what I have already told you is well in the past. For the past several years, Fern has been traveling the northwest in her van while working part time, seasonal jobs. One of the big ones is working the Christmas season at a Washington state Amazon distribution center. You may have heard a few horror stories about these plants but Nomadland is not about the myriad ways Amazon exploits a poor, impoverished workforce.

Instead, the job at Amazon is illustrative of Fern’s desire to remain independent at all cost, even if it means sacrificing holidays to work for crappy pay that includes the company paying for people like Fern to have a parking space for their vans or campers to sleep in near the facility. That’s not to say that there aren’t people like Fern who welcome the chance to sleep in their van and keep moving around, it’s about my anger toward a company with so much money it could afford to buy all of these people homes and pay them a living wage but instead hordes cash like a desperate squirrel ahead of a hard winter.

That however, is not the point of Nomadland. Well it is but it isn’t. Nomadland isn’t about attacking the economic establishment but it is a movie that lays the groundwork for such critiques. It’s hard not to want to criticize an economic system that appears to inspire so many individuals to throw away comfort and assuage security because they’ve grown such an astonishing mistrust of our institutions.

Nomadland features not just Fern, but a large community of van and camper dwellers who’ve abandoned the rat race for a community that shares resources, trades or gives away needed items and are always supportive of each other. It’s not exactly utopia, Nomadland is unafraid of showing the hardships of this lifestyle just as it is eager to show the romance of it. Rather, the film seems to, intentionally or otherwise, demonstrate why the greatest country in the world has engendered such a deep distrust in so many people.

Frances McDormand delivers a deeply empathetic performance in Nomadland. Fern is an amazing character and McDormand gives her remarkable life. It is truly a wonder of a performance, ranking easily next to McDormand’s best work. Fern is so beautifully realized, not a romantic figment but a genuine, honest, and beautiful soul whose grief and circumstance has helped her burrow into a life that finally makes sense to her even as it is entirely foreign and forbidding to us.