Nomadland (2020): Along That Ribbon of Highway

Nomadland is a critically praised new film, a warm-hearted road movie, a finely observed, nuanced portrait of dispossessed souls, folks not so different from the rest of us, living precariously and wandering some of the most desolate yet beautiful reaches of the richest country in the world. As the central character pointedly puts it, not homeless exactly, but certainly houseless.  In theaters and streaming since mid-February, this movie is a top contender for Academy Award success – with six Oscar nominations: best picture of the year, leading actress, director, cinematography, adapted screenplay, and editing. It’s already won a slew of awards at film festivals around the world; has very high scores of 93 on Metacritics.com and 94 on RottenTomatoes.com based on critics reviews; plus viewer scores of 7.6 stars (out of 10) on IMDB and 82% (equivalent to 8.2 stars) on Rotten Tomatoes. All of which is to say that Nomadland  is a winner - at least for most people.  

Not bad for only the third feature film of its 36-year-old Beijing-born Chinese-American writer-director, Chloe Zhou – and it’s a rather low budget picture at that (made for under $5 million).  Zhou’s second feature, 2017’s The Rider, was justifiably much admired.  So much so that Marvel Studios  plucked Zhou to direct (and co-write) its mega-budget ($200 million) superhero film The Eternals, set for release in Fall 2021. The attraction and success of Nomadland  is all the more amazing in that it was shot while The Eternals was in active development.  In fact,  Zhou wound-up editing both films at the same time! 

Nomadland  is also the first Zhou picture featuring a bankable star, with a terrific Frances McDormand [Fargo (1996), Olive Kitteridge (2014), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)] in the lead. All the other cast members, with one exception, are real people playing versions of themselves – a characteristic of both previous Zhou features as well. The exception is pro actor David Strathairn [Good Night and Good Luck (2005), Lincoln (2012)], in a supporting role as a potential companion/love interest for McDormand’s character. 

McDormand plays Fern, a recently widowed sixty-year-old working-class lady. It’s 2011, and the great recession that began in 2008 has not yet retreated into America’s rearview mirror. Not only has she lost her husband – but much of Fern’s adult life has evaporated as well.  One victim of the cratered economy was the small and isolated mining town of Empire, Nevada in which Fern and her husband had lived for the past two decades. Empire - a real place, by the way – was abandoned earlier that year by its owner, U.S. Gypsum Corporation, when it closed down the mine and the drywall plant there. Everyone was evicted from the company housing; indeed, even the zip code was erased, as Fern notes.

Always a loner, now jobless and uprooted, without significant savings or other financial resources,  Fern has decided to fulfill a long-deferred wanderlust; she’s tricked out an old van into a makeshift camper and hit the road. Sometime later, this is where we find her, in an encampment of other similarly situated displaced folks – referring to themselves as nomads and, generally speaking, rather proud of it.

One of the curious and fascinating things about Nomadland  is the fact that most of the denizens of this community of itinerants in the film are themselves actual nomads, not actors. The characters they play are sometimes lightly fictionalized, but mostly not. As they gather in temporary, often improvised encampments, they tell each other their stories – a natural, bonding impulse for them and a revelatory experience for us. The result is a unique and intriguing blending of two generally quite different cinema forms: the narrative (fiction) story and the documentary. Indeed, the nomads and their stories are the real focus of the movie; the plot, by which I mean Fern’s journey, is the frame that holds all of this together  

Zhou is exceptionally talented in the difficult art of fashioning narrative films from the experiences of non-professional actors.  The Rider, for example, is the true story of a young cowboy/horse trainer, who suffered a career-ending fractured skull in a rodeo accident and how he was forced to reconsider his life in the aftermath. Not only did Zhou get Brady Jandrieu, the rider on whose story the film is based, to star as a slightly altered version of himself, but she has his father play his father, his sister play his sister, and several of his friends appear in the movie as his friends – all quite credibly. While they are performing in a movie based on their own lives, these folks are, in fact, acting. The same is true with most of the characters in Nomadland . 

The movie Nomadland  started out as an article by Jessica Bruder for Harper’s magazine about the growing cohort of people like Fern, mostly single – widowed, divorced – mostly white, and mostly in late middle-age or elderly, many of whom lost their homes and/or their livelihoods in the great recession, wandering the American West. Bruder spent three years following these nomads around the country, interviewing scores of them, acquiring her own van to travel with them and better understand that life. The article evolved into a book, also called Nomadland (2017). And now this wonderful, immersive, intriguing movie.

One of Zhou’s many achievements is how she tells the story of these American nomads from the inside out – using McDormand’s tremendous gifts as an actor and the everyman persona of her fictional Fern character to lead us in, so as to see these people and their itinerant society with empathy and fascination.

The movie includes several of the same characters that were featured in the book – perhaps most importantly Linda May. Linda is a silver haired lady who befriends Fern and talks about her dream to build an “earthship”, where she and others can settle down in a sustainable, alternative lifestyle.  Bruder met her at Rubber Tramp Rendezvous [RTR],  an annual winter-season gathering of nomads in Western Arizona, founded by white bearded visionary Bob Wells, who also appears in the film.  Many of the nomads at RTR live in make-shift van-homes; others in small, sometimes handmade trailers. Linda May was Bruder’s entrée into this world.

After Bruder’s book came out, McDormand optioned the movie rights.   She claims she always imagined herself at age 65 breaking out of her movie actor life, getting a van and heading out to wander and explore the country. McDormand brought Zhou into the project on the basis of The Rider. She loved Zhou’s ability to connect with real people, to gain their trust and make them comfortable portraying folks just like themselves. And how she could adapt her stories on the fly to naturalistically fit the actual life experiences of her subjects. McDormand and Zhou wound up living in camper vans themselves during the four months of the Nomadland  shoot. This not only helped them connect with the other characters, but was a practical necessity given the numerous shooting locations in places like Badlands National Park and Custer State Park in South Dakota; Fernley, Nevada; Scottsbluff, Nebraska; and Quartzsite, Arizona.

When she was asked to play herself in the film, Linda May agreed, because she trusted Zhou to tell it straight. Somehow, Zhou made it easy to open up and talk about difficult things, even with a film crew there. In the movie, there’s a scene where Linda talks to Fern about a reaching a point in life where she was thinking about suicide. The scene was shot in one take in the very close quarters of Linda’s tiny trailer, roughly 6’ x  9’ inside, the two women’s knees just about touching, with the cinematographer and his camera, a sound guy with a boom and the director somehow also squeezed in. Zhou said, “Just tell Frances your story.” “ So I did”, says Linda. She relates how she had sunk to a place of desolation. with no hope for the future.  Until, that is, she met Bob Wells at RTR  and connected with the communal spirit of his nomad community. “He called us a tribe. And with my Indian ancestry, I felt like, Yes, I need a tribe. And they welcomed me with open arms.” 

Another real life character featured in the picture is simply called Swankie. Like Linda May, she plays herself in the film, with a bit of poetic license taken to dramatize the story. At age 64, Swankie, facing financial troubles, moved into her van and hit the road, seeking occasional seasonal work, while roaming the West - often to gathering spots for other older “nomads” in similar circumstances, among them Bob and Linda. Swankie has taken the wandering life to heart and at age 78, she has no plans to settle down in one place. As she told the Los Angeles Times: “There are many others [like me] who have purposely chosen this lifestyle – downsizing, owning nothing but what they have with them and leaving an extremely small carbon footprint. That does not mean we are suffering, going without, staying dirty, eating badly. For me, I am healthier now at 78 than I was at 40. … I am just a lone ol’ granny desert rat, loving my life every day.”

Sounds charming, but as some folks learn the hard way, living hand to mouth in a vehicle, be it a van or RV, leaves you just one breakdown or one serious illness away from possible catastrophe, if you don’t have some sort of financial backup.  Nomadland  is not exactly an advertisement for a carefree life. There’s no such thing, of course.  And living with little to no resources comes with no small amount of risk. In part, the film explores and slyly comments on the effect that the great recession had on this group of people and the vulnerabilities that brought so many to hit the road.  Its success is due in part to the excellence of Zhou and her cast; but I suspect that another part has to do with its special resonance for many of us living through the covid era. 

The protagonist, Fern, has her own individual story, but like so many of the characters in the movie and in the nomad community generally, she has to develop the strength of character to move forward even as the life she had known for so long crumbled and disappeared.  Zhou says that over the last year, with its economic displacements and isolating social hardships, “we’ve all had to go through some version of what Fern has felt – this feeling of great loss to a life you used to have. It’s this void you feel, the need to go back to [some kind of] normal.”  

Before I conclude, I must give a shout out to Joshua James Richards, Zhou’s cinematographer on this and her two earlier pictures as well. Simply put, Nomadland  is one visually gorgeous film. Richard’s ability to capture the stark beauty of wide-open Western spaces on the one hand and the cluttered simplicity, yet very human warmth of humble interiors on the other is simply brilliant. It’s one of the features of the movie that make it feel so universal. The physical environment is ever present when you’re living in a van. The landscape of the American West is vast, rugged and  beautiful. As it turns out, so are the interior landscapes of the people populating Nomadland .   

I found the movie to be engaging, troubling, thought provoking and visually quite stunning. McDormand is just fabulous in a low-key role. All the characters seemed completely authentic. I liked the movie but didn’t feel completely wowed by it as the end credits started rolling. Yet my mind kept returning to what I had seen in the days that followed; and the more I thought about it (and subsequently learned about it) the more I liked and appreciated it.  If you are one of the many who have already seen Nomadland, I’d love to hear your reactions and thoughts on the film [pro or con]. Feel free to comment here on the blog site or drop me a line.

1 hour 47 minutes MPAA rating: R  [language]

Grade: A

In theaters nationally, and streaming exclusively (for now) on Hulu.