The film that took home four Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards has – as of last Friday – landed on Disney+. I'm late coming to this film partly because I like to avoid the Oscar buzz around films and judge them on their own merits and partly because cinemas are not open and I felt this film, with its large vistas deserved to be seen on the big screen. Last weekend I sat down to watch it and I think I will rewatch it if it ever comes to cinemas because, I was right, the rich landscapes and beautiful cinematography of Joshua James Richards needs to be projected large.
The simple premise of Chloe Zhao's film is that Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman deeply grieving the death of her husband, has decided to leave her home and join up with the ragged fraternity of workers—mostly old people—who live in their vans or cars, and who follow seasonal work the way migrant farmworkers follow a harvest. The make-or-break moment for me was right at the start as Fern, a woman in late middle age poked around her storage unit, sifting through her memories. It was an aching scene and one where I could have watched an entire film on that subject alone. You spend your whole life accumulating things, and then they end up in a storage unit, slowly losing their charge of sentiment and memory and transforming into junk. Fern is there to pick out what she will bring with her on the journey. In the end, she chooses the least practical thing of all: a box of china, white with a pattern of red leaves on the rim. One of the things I admired very much about the film was that we didn’t have to sit through a first act of how she made the decision to live on the road, and how she learned the practicalities of managing that kind of life. She’s already in the life, and it’s our job to keep up. In the next scene, she’s crouching down on a wide, cold piece of ground in the endless expanse of the great American flyover, the only sound the trickle of water from some nearby stream. The camera pulls back and we see that it’s not a stream we’re hearing; she’s peeing— displaying all the vulnerability and indignity of a woman peeing outdoors. Afterward, she all but runs back to the van, a moment every woman can identify with. Everything is more dangerous when you’re female.
It’s a slow-moving, touching tale about the kinds of modern-day nomads that can be found living right across the United States – whether by circumstance, or choice. At a more meta level, the film celebrates independence, adventure and the power of the human spirit. Nomadland has been criticized for romanticizing Fern’s life and that of the other nomads. It’s adapted from a book by the journalist Jessica Bruder, which expanded on her 2014 Harper’s cover story, “The End of Retirement,” documenting the subculture of older, broke Americans who live in their vehicles. It also introduced readers to the Amazon program that capitalizes on their misfortune. These nomads have come to the end of the line financially, any promises made or implied have been broken. These jobs—whether at Amazon or another employer needing a cheap, disposable workforce not seeking benefits or commitments besides an hourly wage—are things that young bodies are built to perform, not old ones. Repetitive-stress injuries, falls, and endless shifts take a deep toll on these workers, and there’s a spot in hell for the person who decided to demand 12-hour shifts from people in their 70s. But these are matters that the director, Chloé Zhao, is uninterested in documenting. She refuses to see these nomads as tragic figures. They are captains of their fate, driving America’s never-ending highways, working their bodies raw, tuning their radios for scratchy reception of Christmas carols and classical music, and heating up canned soup on camping stoves. They live at once alone and communally. Each has a vehicle, a tiny world unto itself, and most have learned how to live within ever-shifting groups of other nomads for safety, companionship, and advice.
The movie’s two missteps are introducing a conventional love story and having Fern’s well-off sister swoop in with the money she needs when her van breaks down. The scene in which Fern learns from a mechanic that the van won’t drive without that repair was the film’s one exciting moment. All along you’ve understood that these people are poor, and like all poor people (and many nonpoor people) in America, they are always one bad diagnosis, one necessary car repair, one rotting tooth away from catastrophe. I wondered if this was when Fern would fall below the line that separated the nomads from people living in shelters.
I found the film powerful, informational, boring, generous, and hopeful. I hate preaching films, and verbose films, and films in which complex and seemingly intractable problems are solved through movie magic. There is no solution here, no redemption, no ending. At times Nomadland plays like a Louis Theroux "slice of life" documentary and every so often I had to remind myself these are real people living on the edge. Indeed, many of the characters are real life people, playing themselves in the film. McDormand's Oscar was richly deserved. It's an understated, vulnerable performance.
Having lived in several States in the US, I have often thought that, to paraphrase the Coen Brothers, the USA is no country for old people.