Nomadland (2020) Review

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 is thin by design and thinner than it needed to be.

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 are 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 has had a full life, and states plainly that she is not going to spend her remaining months in a hospital.

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, which is why the scenes have a texture casting could not supply.

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, which 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 is brief and slightly defensive. Fern says she was not what people thought and that her husband is only remembered by her, which is the closest the film comes to explaining why she cannot 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 is visibly fine and visibly elsewhere. He is 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 is not worth fixing, and a woman explaining that she lives in it and he does not 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 is being sympathetic.

When she is offered a bed in a house late in the film, she tries it, cannot sleep, and goes out to the van. The film states nothing about that and does not 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.

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 is presented as a decent seasonal employer with a pleasant break room. The work is shown as tiring and the arrangement is never examined.

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, which makes it a way of life.

That is a legitimate choice and it has a cost. A picture about economic displacement that treats the economy as weather has decided that these lives are a landscape, and the beauty of the photography makes that worse instead of better.

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 cannot easily deliver a verdict she would reject. That is a real answer and it does not begin to cover the people around her who plainly did not choose any of it. Swankie did not choose a diagnosis and Linda May did not choose a retirement that paid nothing, and neither of them is refusing to be a victim, they are 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.

The film ends with her driving out with nothing settled, which is correct for the material, and the last title card notes that the road is not 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, which is a pattern worth noticing.

Ludovico Einaudi’s piano runs under a great deal of this and it is the element most likely to divide people. It is beautiful and it is continuously telling the audience that what they are watching is sad and lovely, which is an editorial position the rest of the film is careful to avoid.

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.

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 what surrounds them is a beautifully photographed film that declines to ask why anybody is living in a van at seventy.

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