Nomadland (2020) Review
7/10
Official trailer
A gypsum plant closes in Empire, Nevada, and the town’s zip code is discontinued six months later. Fern loses her job, her husband and the place she lived, converts a van, and takes seasonal work at an Amazon warehouse for the winter.
The 7 is for a film with extraordinary access and a soft center. Chloe Zhao cast real nomads as themselves, put a professional actor among them, and got performances no script could produce. The structure around that’s thin by design and thinner than it needed to be.
I’m moved by this film and frustrated with it in about equal measure. The people in it get to me, Swankie above all, and McDormand’s quiet work is something I admire a great deal. What nags at me is how politely the film looks away from the reason these people are on the road at all. What it declines to do is the problem. The film shows people in their sixties and seventies working night shifts because a pension disappeared, and treats the situation as weather.
The Real People Are the Film
Linda May, Swankie and Bob Wells appear as themselves, using their own names, telling their own histories, and they’re the reason the picture exists. Swankie’s account of her diagnosis and what she intends to do with the time is the best sequence in it. She describes a moment on a river with swallows, decides she’s had a full life, and states plainly that she’s not going to spend her remaining months in a hospital.
That scene with the swallows is the reason I rate the film as high as I do. Nobody wrote it, and I can hear that in every sentence she speaks. I’d trade most of the scripted material for another reel of her.
None of it is performed. These are people who have told these stories before, to other people around fires, and the film’s method is to put McDormand in the circle and let the camera run.
Bob Wells is the closest thing to a thesis the picture has. He runs the gathering, lost a son, and talks about grief with a directness nothing else in the film approaches, and his advice is that you say goodbye by seeing the person again down the road.
Wells is a real figure who runs an actual annual gathering in Arizona for people living in vehicles, and the film shot at it. The crowd around those fires is largely people who came for the event instead of for the production. That’s why the scenes have an authenticity casting couldn’t supply.
Mixing non-professionals with an actor works when the actor’s job is to listen. McDormand does almost nothing in these scenes except attend. That keeps the tone level. The requirement is that the non-professionals speak about what they know. The moment somebody untrained has to deliver plot, the artifice becomes audible and the whole approach collapses.
For prose, the equivalent is interview material carried into fiction. Use the cadence and the specifics, and don’t make the borrowed voice explain your theme.
McDormand Disappears
The performance is built on subtraction. Fern has no monologue, no breakdown, and almost no scene where she explains herself, and the film resists every opportunity to give her one.
McDormand also did the work. She took seasonal jobs during production, lived in the van, and the physical competence on screen is real. That matters because half the film is somebody changing a tire or emptying a bucket.
What she plays throughout is somebody who has decided this is a choice and is defending that position against people who keep offering her alternatives. Her sister offers a room. David offers a family. She declines both.
The one scene where she states her case is with her sister, and it’s brief and slightly defensive. Fern says she wasn’t what people thought and that she’s the only one who remembers her husband. That’s the closest the film comes to explaining why she can’t stop moving.
David Strathairn does the other half of that thread. He offers her an ordinary life with his family, gently and without pressure, and the film gives them a Thanksgiving table where she’s visibly fine and visibly elsewhere. He’s not a mistake and she leaves anyway.
The Van Is a Character
Vanguard has a bed, a bucket, a stove, a photograph and a stack of plates that belonged to her father, and the film spends real time on the logistics of all of it.
That attention is the picture’s strongest instinct. Where the toilet is, what happens when the vehicle breaks down, how much a repair costs against what she has, and what it means to ask a relative for the money.
The breakdown sequence is the film’s most honest stretch. A three-and-a-half-thousand-dollar repair on a vehicle worth less, a mechanic explaining it’s not worth fixing, and a woman explaining that she lives in it and he doesn’t understand. What follows is worse and the film knows it. She has to ask her sister for the money, drive to a suburb, sit in a living room with people who have houses, and listen to a conversation about property prices from somebody who thinks she’s being sympathetic.
The sister’s living room is the scene that stings me most. The talk about property prices is so casual, and I think it’s the one moment where the film lets itself be angry, even if it’s restrained about it.
When she’s offered a bed in a house late in the film, she tries it, can’t sleep, and goes out to the van. The film states nothing about that and doesn’t need to.
The plates are the object the film returns to. They belonged to her father, she keeps them in a van that shakes for thousands of miles, and when one breaks the reaction is out of proportion to a plate and exactly proportionate to everything else.
Procedure is characterization when the procedure is difficult. Every practical problem your character solves tells the reader what they’ll tolerate, and it does so without a line of introspection.
Cost is the most efficient detail available. A number attached to a repair, set against a number in a bank account, does more than a page about precarity.
Let the refusal be physical. She tries the bed, can’t sleep, and leaves. Nobody says anything and the reader understands completely.
What It Will Not Say
The film opens with the closure of a plant and the discontinuation of a zip code, and then spends two hours declining to connect that to anything. Amazon appears, cooperated with production, and the film presents it as a decent seasonal employer with a pleasant break room. It shows the work as tiring and never examines the arrangement. Jessica Bruder’s book is a work of reporting about a workforce of older Americans living in vehicles because retirement stopped functioning, and it names companies, wages and conditions. The film keeps the people and removes the argument.
The word the book uses and the film avoids is workamper, an industry term for a seasonal worker who lives on site in a vehicle. Naming a thing makes it a category with employers attached, and the film prefers nomad. That makes it a way of life. That’s a legitimate choice and it’s a cost. A picture about economic displacement that treats the economy as weather has decided that these lives are scenery, and the beauty of the photography makes that worse instead of better.
This is where the film loses me. I don’t need a lecture, but Bruder’s book handed the filmmakers names and wages, and I think throwing those away for golden-hour vistas was a bad trade.
The defense available to it is that Fern insists throughout that she chose this, and a film built around somebody who refuses to be a victim can’t easily deliver a verdict she’d reject. That’s a real answer and it doesn’t begin to cover the people around her who plainly didn’t choose any of it. Swankie didn’t choose a diagnosis and Linda May didn’t choose a retirement that paid nothing, and neither of them is refusing to be a victim, they’re simply working.
The Ending
Fern returns to Empire, walks through the empty plant and the empty house, stands in a room where she lived, and leaves. It ends with her driving out with nothing settled. That’s correct for the material, and the last title card notes that the road isn’t an ending. It took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and Zhao became the second woman to win the directing award. The reception was almost entirely positive and the dissent came largely from people who had read the book. That’s a pattern worth noticing. Ludovico Einaudi’s piano runs under a great deal of this and it’s the element most likely to divide people. It’s beautiful and it’s continuously telling the audience that what they’re watching is sad and lovely. That’s an editorial position the rest of the film is careful to avoid.
I’d have used that piano far less. Every time it swells, I feel nudged toward a sadness the faces on screen were already giving me for free.
Joshua James Richards shot it at dawn and dusk almost exclusively, and the result is an American west that looks like a place people would choose. That gorgeousness is the film’s biggest achievement and its central problem at the same time.
Beauty is an argument whether you intend it or not. Photographing hardship at golden hour tells the reader something about how to feel, and it’ll override whatever the text is doing.
The same applies to prose rhythm. If your sentences become most lyrical when describing deprivation, the reader learns that you find it aesthetic, and they’ll trust the account less. A refusal to editorialize is itself a position. Deciding that a situation is simply how things are is an argument about causation delivered by omission.
Should you watch Nomadland?
Yes, for the people in it. Swankie and Bob Wells telling their own stories to a camera is the best thing here, and McDormand’s listening is the reason those scenes work. The 7 is what’s left after I subtract a film that photographs hardship like a postcard and declines to ask why anybody is living in a van at seventy. I admire it a lot. I wish it had been angrier.
