Nomadland Review
Halfway through Nomadland, a sentimental dinner plate accidentally breaks. The plate is a family keepsake that Fern (Frances McDormand) stores lovingly in her van and home after the death of her husband and the closing of her entire town. In a different movie, the plate breaking would have pushed our hero over the edge, a literal breaking point that spiraled her into an emotional outburst of anguish and sorrow. Instead, Fern keeps herself composed. She sweeps the shards up off the ground. She glues the plate back together. She keeps on moving.
Nomadland is the story of a woman dealing with severe loss as she travels from one nomad community to the next, working whatever seasonal job she can find to make ends meet. Grief is well-trodden material in fiction, but rarely is fictional suffering treated with such a non-fictional eye. Nomadland blends real people with professional actors in its depiction of van dwellers, their jobs, their communities, and their pain. Director Chloé Zhao lets the amateur actors talk while Fern (and the audience) listens and learns. Nomads discuss their struggles with PTSD, suicidal depression, and terminal cancer. Fern makes friendships, endures hardships, and keeps chugging along from one RV park to the next.
David Strathairn plays Dave, the film’s only other professional actor. Dave is a fellow nomad who makes it increasingly known that he fancies Fern, despite Fern’s persistence to keep him a van’s length away from intimacy. Dave shouldn’t take it personally, he’s kind and caring, but Fern has dedicated herself to keeping the torch of her former life lit with the combustion generated by pushing her van’s pedal to the floor. Dave eventually learns he will become a grandfather and decides to set anchor to be closer to his family. In doing so, Fern realizes she has a choice to make: build a new life with Dave or continue to tow her heavy past.
The variance in acting styles works exceptionally well. By letting the amateur actors tell and the professional actors show, everyone is playing to their strengths. Fern’s friendship with a few female nomads in the film feel so genuine that at times I wondered if McDormand was even acting or just hanging out with a buddy. I also appreciated the restraint in her role coming off a much showier performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. McDormand delivers the goods with her face alone, and the room she gives the real-life nomads to tell their stories gives the film an absorbing authenticity.
Visually, Nomadland is stunning. Zhao often keeps the camera moving in kinetic ways, with expansive zooms and pans that showcase the beauty of our country. There's poetry in the way she films loud, epic landscapes while the people moving through them are stoic and quiet. Nomadland is sparse on social commentary, which is surprising given that it depicts a real town that disappeared when a sheetrock company closed its doors after the recession. The film doesn’t want to start a conversation as much as present things as they are. All people and all towns eventually become ghosts. Few of us can spare any time to complain about bad luck, bad health, or the injustices we encounter, we keep living, even if that means sleeping in our cars and cleaning bathrooms. Nomadland isn’t pessimistic as much as it is realistic, and in a year where a global pandemic has left many of us close to falling apart, there’s beauty in a film about real people finding ways to glue themselves together.
