Nomadland

Frances McDormand delivers yet another career-capping turn as both star and producer of Nomadland, a moving, somber, sentimentalized character study that explores both the disillusionment and the resilience of many dispossessed Americans following the Great Recession of the late Aughts. McDormand plays Fern, a recently unemployed factory worker who leaves town after her husband dies to live the self-reliant yet communal lifestyle of intentionally "houseless" American transients who travel around the United States, living in vans and doing short-term seasonal work.

The film is based on Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017). To adapt this work of journalism, producer McDormand chose Chloé Zhao—writer/director of the acclaimed indies Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017). While I'm not a big fan of Zhao, her documentary approach to developing and shooting fiction features fits both the subject matter and the highbrow nature of this production. While her first two films were critical darlings, they were more interesting for how they were made and who they starred than for the stories they told. My issue with Zhao's blend of documentary and fiction features up to now is that her pictures embody the weakest aspects of each format.

Both Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider are intriguing because they star non-actors playing versions of themselves, and Zhao writes scripts based on what she finds fascinating about these individuals. Thus, the films have the verisimilitude of a documentary but lack that format’s ability to delve deep into a given subject matter. Even a mid-level cinéma vérité doc provides rich observational textures and insights that Zhao's first two pictures only hint at. And since Zhao doesn't want to impose any false theatricality on real-life situations, her scripts amount to little more than loose threads of narrative clichés full of on-the-nose dialogue. Thus, these dramas lack... drama. Their most poetic elements come from shooting in gorgeous rural locations with natural lighting—making me wish these movies were series of large-format photographs that could make us wonder about the people depicted rather than feature films that try to explain who these people are.

But Nomadland is both more conventional and more successful than Zhao's first two pictures because of how it mixes McDormand and other actors—like David Strathairn as her potential love interest—with the actual characters who inspired Bruder's book. Fern is a fictional composite who interacts with many of the real-life nomads profiled in the book—most notably Bob Wells, Linda May, and Charlene Swankie, three “vandwellers” from whom Fern learns about this world. Many scenes simply show Fern sitting and talking with these folks. In what seems to be their own words, they tell stories of their hard lives as well as the freedom and satisfaction they've come to enjoy by casting off the burdens of family obligations, property ownership, and long-term responsibility to anyone other than themselves. Most of these individuals are on the older side. They are stoic survivors with good senses of humor and lots of skills, experiences, and knowledge that one might not expect and never discover without sitting and listening to them (as Bruder did in researching her book and as Fern does on her cinematic journey).

These individuals represent the rising number of citizens for whom a stable existence has become unattainable in today’s harsh economic climate. Thus Nomadland captures something quintessential about 2020—a traumatic, desperate, and deadly year for so many Americans. Yet this movie centers on folks who have adapted, persevered, and found a life that works for them; it does not explore the lives of those for whom the loss of a job or a family member was the beginning of a much darker downward spiral. We come to see Fern as a woman who finds her true self by stripping away all but the most essential material possessions, not someone forced into limited and potentially dangerous circumstances by a society that cares little for those at the bottom and for whom it provides only the most threadbare of social safety nets.

Because of this, Nomadland plays less like a bleak document of contemporary American poverty and more like an uplifting neo-Western about rugged individuals who ride the range in vans and work for faceless employers at big box stores and Amazon warehouses the way cowboys and migrants worked for wealthy, corrupt ranchers and cattle barons in the 1800s. It is also a road movie that celebrates the distinct American wanderlust that’s been a staple of cinema since the silent era. The open road in movies represents limitless possibilities, not the monotony of a straight line that leads nowhere. And Zhao, working with cinematographer Joshua James Richards—who also shot her first two pictures—shoots everything with the indulgent reverence of Terrance Malick; capturing sweeping natural vistas, often at magic hour, in which the human characters sometimes look like foreign intruders and at other times like they exist in perfect harmony and balance with the rest of nature.

Nomadland feels a little too clean and too simplistic, as if Zhao is determined to avoid exploring the harshest truths or most dramatic dangers that lay just beneath her plucky tale of rugged individualists living in extreme, precarious conditions. But it's hard not to get swept up in Fern’s steely tenacity, her eye-opening journey, and the intriguing people she meets along the way—both the fictional and the real-life characters. McDormand's performance is the key to making this potentially precious indie feel like the Hollywood construct it is, which is actually a good thing.