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CHloé Zhao’s Nomadland is a fully inspired fictional-documentary hybrid, like his previous feature film The Rider. It is a kind, compassionate, and questioning film about the American soul. With artistry and grace, Zhao turns non-professionals into an imaginary story built around a cheerful, witty middle-aged woman, played by Frances McDormand. This quiet and modest performance may be the best of her career so far.
Nomadland, presented at the Toronto Film Festival, is about a new phenomenon: the American generation in their 60s and 70s whose economic futures were shattered by the 2008 crisis. They are grizzled middle-class fighters reduced to poverty who do not they can afford to retire but cannot afford to work while maintaining a home. Thus they have become nomads, a new American tribe roaming the country in motorhomes where they sleep, seeking seasonal work in bars, restaurants and, in this film, in a gigantic Amazon warehouse in Nevada, taking the place of the Agriculture. Job sought by itinerant workers in stories like The Grapes of Wrath. Zhao was even allowed to film inside one of the mysterious cathedrals of Amazon’s service industry.
The film shows you that alongside the hardships and heartache, there is also serenity in this way of life, even a kind of euphoria: without the burdens of a home and possessions, you can have glorious and very American freedom in the lost. Emerson and Twain tradition. But what if your truck, or your body, shows signs of collapse?
The film is inspired by Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, and by radical and anti-capitalist nomadic leader Bob Wells, who appears as himself and has a devastatingly moving speech to the movie’s ending. movie.
McDormand plays Fern, a widow and former substitute teacher in Empire, Nevada, a city wiped off the map by a factory shutdown, who is forced to pile some possessions into a rickety pickup and drive off, something she accepts with utter lack of self-pity. The people she meets along the way are mostly actual nomads who have vivid screen presences and McDormand’s modest and balanced personality fits easily into this group. In a way, her character functions as an interviewer for the film or an ambassador in the real world. Zhao and McDormand have to bring their fictional existence into their real lives and bring their lives into an imaginary world. McDormand is a wonderful diplomat for this creative process. The other fictional character is a nice, if awkward person, a fellow nomad-vagabond (David Strathairn) who has a crush on Fern.
Sometimes Nomadland seems like a very, very sweet and positive version of Mad Max – a movie about a post-apocalyptic America where the people riding in vans and trucks are just hippie souls who just want to help each other. I spent a few anxious minutes here and there waiting for what I assumed would be the inevitable raid by violent Hells Angels or mocking materialists, but it never happened. And somehow this is not a post-apocalypse: nomads find work and their lives serve a kind of purpose, even a nobility. Fern’s sister compares them to American pioneers. Sometimes the movie feels like a tour of a desert planet, especially when heading to the Badlands National Park in South Dakota, where there is also tourism work. But the nomads are not alone. They have each other and their relationship with the non-nomadic world is far from hostile.
It is quite possible that Zhao was inspired by films like Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) or Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), with their world of hard scrabble. The important difference is that his film is not directionally shaped by narrative, that is, a narrative towards disaster, in the usual way, although there are important plot developments related to Fern’s relationship with her shy suitor. It is more of a group portrait and a portrait of the time, done with exceptional intelligence and style. Arguably, he’s not angry enough about the economic forces that are causing all of this, but he still seems magnificently outspoken. There is real greatness in Chloé Zhao movie making.
