Review – Nomadland

Continuing our reviews of possible Oscar nominees, guest writer Siddharth Maitra has an in-depth and spoiler-free look at Nomadland.

The year 2011. The small town of Empire, Nevada; home to the US Gypsum Corporation which used to provide jobs to a significant part of the population. A drop in demand for sheetrock has led to the closure of the mine and the company shutting down. The place becomes a ghost town, its ZIP Code erased within 6 months.

For over forty years, through thick and thin, our sixty year old protagonist – Fern – has lived in this town. But in those harsh six months, her husband dies. Now with the economy collapsed, her husband dead, and the town all but gone – she hits the road in her van taking all she holds dear (including her mother’s precious crockery) in order to find work. Again and again people sympathise with her, really just want to help her. But she denies for herself to be categorised as a victim of this economic collapse. She refuses sympathy and help all alike from genuine people and is devoted first and foremost to her self-sufficiency and freedom.

This, however, is not a character study. Not in the conventional sense anyway. It’s only a set-up for Fern to eventually be introduced to the eponymous Nomads. A hidden, sizeable population – almost a tribe, if you will – that has gone unmentioned and unnoticed in the vast, highlighted history of a country that has never quite known what to do with its economically disadvantaged and culturally displaced geriatric population.

These nomads live on the country’s roads, on its railways, on open fields and spaces or its quiet forests. Sometimes in groups. Often alone. Always shifting, always in flux. Their RVs the shells they devote their lives to. But over 90% of these RV-ers age over 55.

Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland in essence, is a well-oiled empathy machine for these landscapes, for these people, for this lifestyle. As McDormand herself said in the Q&A after the TIFF Screening, Fern is almost like a docent into the world of nomadic living. Acting as a window, but one that we also see growing herself as the film goes along. What is it like to be “houseless” at the age of 60?

Fern herself meets up with these makeshift dwellers out of curiosity. Her first steps into nomadic living almost feel like testing waters and it takes a long while before she submits to the deep dive.

And what a deep dive it is. “Lyrical” is probably the word most suited to describe this film. Almost like a gentle brook, the film’s elements flow in and out of the screen. These nomads, always on the roads, come across each other at several points in the film, sometimes even making temporary communities. But no one stays. Everyone moves on with their own individual lives, going off their separate ways. Alone. Until they meet again someday, sometime. Far down the road.

Even Ludovico Eunaudi’s resplendent, minimalistic score floats in and out of the film at moments that only feel perfect on an instinctive level. It’s a gorgeous piece of music. Simplistic at first but growing ever richer, collecting, accumulating. It mirrors Fern’s own journey of getting a foothold in this unknown terrain of life.

Zhao and her cinematographer Joshua James Richards are able to weave a quasi-spiritual experience in the way they capture its many beautiful landscapes without fetishizing them. They’re not “beauty shots”, edited to look their aesthetic best and ready to sell on postcards. Instead the camera falls into its own rhythmic dance that effortlessly shifts from dynamic and evocative montages to really slow, lingering shots and then back again. Like a pair of lungs exhaling and inhaling to create a hypnotic, almost haunting poetry on life.

It is almost preposterous how Nomadland seems to be a mix of two acclaimed films that I dislike – Into the Wild and The Tree of Life. But where they fail by overtly drawing connections between intimate relationships and the grandiose saga of life as we know it, Nomadland soars by letting that connection play out organically. One could say that almost nothing of note happens throughout the film. You may wait for it, but you won’t find a single scene with a big, emotional payoff or a life-changing event that changes the film’s narrative in a significant way. But just like a steady stream, its waves ebb and flow, singing the quiet platitudes of the many faces it encounters.

It is easy to see why Frances McDormand read the book this is based on and immediately sought after a director to turn this into a film. It is also easy to see why the mantle of helming this ultimately fell on Chloe Zhao. In many ways Nomadland‘s actor-director pairing fits like a hand in a glove.

People familiar with Zhao’s work would already know what kind of film to expect here. She is now three features into her filmmaking career, and it seems that she has perfected her signature style. All three of her films seem to make up an informal Trilogy of sorts that deal with real people from marginalised communities playing slightly fictional versions of their lives. ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me’ , ‘The Rider’ and now Nomadland – all finely blur the line between fact and fiction and a large part of that is the casting.

By casting the same people whose stories she wants to tell, her films veer into hyper-realism. There is simply something about the hard, ragged natural lines that mark the many faces in Zhao’s films. There’s a beauty to that. A reality that is a far-cry from the chiseled, smooth, perfected looks of movie stars.

In Nomadland we meet such people in the form of Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells and Derek. Each of them indomitable, in their own ways. Each of them with a certain stoicity. All reflecting years and years of history behind every dialogue they speak. One monologue by the silver-haired Swankie is so astonishingly raw and lovely that it is nigh impossible to be not moved to tears. They are all individual threads that unite to form a fabric of all the fading stories that never get told. Stories that stretch wide open the hitherto filtered culture and history of the US.

Nomadland is the first time where Zhao’s lead is an acclaimed and well-recognised professional actress. But Frances McDormand fits right in alongside the hardened, vibrant characters that colour this film. McDormand has one of the most striking, memorable and expressive faces in the film world. With deepened valleys and furrowed troughs, her face is a landscape in itself. Her visage becomes a part of the land, of her surroundings, of the people she travels with. Her face aging along the same lines as the Saguaro cactuses growing in the deserts she comes upon.

But here, Frances completely delivers an effortless performance. I’m sure there must be a lot of work that went into her performance, but the most striking part of it all is how it feels completely devoid of acting. McDormand doesn’t just live the character, she basically moulds and creates it. We know that there’s hardly anyone else who plays dour, restlessness as convincingly as McDormand. But Fern here is vastly different. While she still has that temperamental element to her, she also comes across as incredibly warm and open. Wherever she goes, her charm follows and she makes friends. Sometimes crippled with her own loneliness and yet other times craving for the same.

There is always a disquieting sense that she’s running away from something. Running away from her sense of grief over Empire and her husband. But she also seems genuinely excited and positively curious about putting her own sense of self-sufficiency to test, always looking ahead for the endless possibilities that lay before. There’s a childlike curiosity in her, a willingness to absorb and grow. It makes this film feel like a coming-of-age story, but for a 60-year old. Every smile, every unblinking stare, every tear seems to have an unspoken history behind it. We genuinely believe that Fern has had a fully realised life before the film began, and will continue to do so after the film is done.

It’s possibly my favorite and perhaps the best Frances McDormand performance – and that is saying a lot for someone whose greatest hits include the likes of Marge Gunderson, Mrs. Pell and Mildred Hayes.

Nomadland won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and it certainly deserved to. However this will be a film that would not be as popular with the masses as the previous winner – Joker – was. I believe its lack of narrative or dramatic beats would simply end up leaving people wanting to be entertained, cold. And yet I think neither of those things are a point against the film. Its lack of an overt narrative is essential to experience its raw emotional power. A lesser film would certainly have played up Fern’s flaws just to give her a noticeable character arc but this is not such a film. By keeping the emotions sustained, Zhao manages to make something as simple as running your finger on a dusted table feel like a climax. It is also of note here that while Fern’s character is an important one, it isn’t the only one.

Where Zhao’s film triumphs most of all is in painting a vigorous portrait of old age being lived at the edge of life. Without any regrets. Without any companions. But also without any judgement. It is a quiet, beautiful and arrestingly lyrical film that beats with a heart so loud that you can still hear Fern’s father’s words ringing like a faint echo;
“𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒅, 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔.
𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕’𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒆𝒅, 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔.”

Siddharth Maitra reviews everything from blockbusters to indies, find more on instagram and Cafes n Cities.