There’s a lot going on in Chloé Zhao’s new film “Nomadland” (streaming on Hulu), not only because of its variety of incidents but because of its heterogeneous composition. Though it runs just under two hours, it’s two movies in one: a documentary and a fiction. These two motifs hardly coalesce to become a hybrid, though; the film is not a docudrama. Rather, the two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.
The story is rooted in an actual event, as stated in an opening title card: the closing, in January, 2011, of U.S. Gypsum’s facility in Empire, Nevada, because of reduced demand for sheetrock. The movie’s protagonist, Fern (Frances McDormand), had long lived in Empire with her husband, Bo, who worked for the company, in the mine. After he died, she stayed in the area, but Empire is a company town, her home was company housing, and when the mine closed she was forced out. Wanting nonetheless to remain in Empire—and her motive drops into the movie only belatedly—she decides to live in her van.
The documentary aspect of “Nomadland”—which was written, directed, and edited by Zhao, and is based on the nonfiction book of the same title by Jessica Bruder—arises from the details of Fern’s changed way of living. She has elaborately renovated her van to make it home-like, and, with Christmas approaching, she takes seasonal work at an enormous Amazon shipping center in the vicinity. She has a reservation (alphabetized under “McD”) at a trailer park, as part of Amazon’s so-called CamperForce; she’s one of a legion of itinerant workers finding a temporary harbor there. (That very detail offers a jolt of investigative observation.) As the gig winds down, an older colleague whom she befriends there, Linda May (played by a woman of the same name), invites her to come to a large gathering of van dwellers in Arizona, run by a charismatic and empathetic organizer named Bob Wells (also playing himself).
That stop becomes only the first in Fern’s many waystations on a long path of wandering that’s sparked by her inability to find other work near Empire. Along the way, she meets a woman named Swankie (played by a person of the same name), who’s on the road for the last time—she has terminal cancer and, rather than living out her days in a hospital, searches for the wonders of nature while she still can. Fern keeps crossing paths with Linda May—who lost her job in 2008, found herself in emotional and economic desperation, and, with only meagre Social Security benefits to sustain her, is able to subsist only by living in a van. Fern, following the road and taking whatever work she can get—at a rock quarry, in a beet-processing plant, as a trailer-park “camp host”—meets a man named Dave (David Strathairn), an acquaintance from the Arizona gathering, whom she eventually follows to another job, as a short-order cook at a large mall-like store in South Dakota.
Aside from McDormand and Strathairn, the film features nonprofessional actors, people who were actually living nomadically: Zhao and her crew explained, in a piece by Eric Kohn at IndieWire, that the production’s advance team travelled to sites where van-dwelling nomads gathered and interviewed them on video, which Zhao then relied on for casting (and for details in the script). I confess: when I first saw “Nomadland” last fall, I didn’t know this backstory, and I assumed that I was watching professional (if unfamiliar) character actors giving skillful performances in the roles of nomads. Perhaps this is because Zhao offers the film’s supporting characters only scanty dialogue, consisting either of informational soundbites or spiritual reflections of Fern’s journey. They feel, in short, like scripted characters speaking to the needs of the drama rather than determining or even affecting it. I’d be eager to see the production team’s audition clips; I’d bet that they’re filled with fascinating observations and profound insights that didn’t make it into the film.
Fern and David also tend to speak in one-liners, or, like the other characters, offer brief (albeit poignant, pain-filled) anecdotes that hit the motivic nail on the head and drive it quickly into its place in the script, explaining with little give or detail what traumas or difficulties spurred them to choose the nomadic life. Incidental talk doesn’t exist: Fern isn’t seen chatting with most of the people she meets at work, or even in the company of her new friends. It isn’t so much that she’s closed-mouthed as that the movie doesn’t linger long enough to listen in.
What’s missing, alongside the characters’ personal lives, are the practicalities of life on the road. The movie is set (in 2011 and 2012) against a backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, but it neglects the basics, the practicalities of nomads’ lives—how do they vote, where do they pay taxes, where do they bank? There’s a sequence involving Dave’s illness and surgery at a hospital, but it’s frictionless; he’s in and then he’s out. By contrast, another film opening Friday, Shatara Michelle Ford’s “Test Pattern,” has a scene involving a very brief visit to a hospital where no procedure is ultimately performed but where the protagonist is nonetheless compelled to sign a document accepting any and all related charges—in order to get her I.D. back from the receptionist. Those thirty seconds say more about the rigors of survival amid the financial squeeze of the medical establishment than does all of “Nomadland.”
The story of Bob’s organizational skills and the loose administration that he appears to maintain is the most notable aspect of the film—its quasi-documentary vision of an alternative local government with apparently no formal or institutional structure, the civic and affective bonds that it creates between people who, by dint of living and travelling in their vans, are necessarily isolated. Bob’s charismatic, virtually sacerdotal role—sermonizing, exhorting, and educating the participants in his widening campfire circle, in order to provide them with what he calls “a support system for people who need help now”—makes him the most fascinating character in the film. Yet what the film offers of him and his story is dropped in belatedly and allusively, in a way that attaches his activity to a large psychological motive—a tragic one—but that leaves the richness of personality and experience untapped.
Bob’s community is indicative of the movie’s vast but implicit political underpinnings, as in one great moment when Bob is about to speak to a large crowd about “the ten commandments of stealth parking”—and I was dying to hear them, but the scene cuts out before he even delivers the first of them. The politics of official hostility to nomads, to the houseless as to the homeless (a notable distinction that Fern herself makes), underlies the action, furnishing several of the sharpest moments in the film, as when Fern, approached in a lot by an official, makes haste to tell her that she got permission to park overnight there, and, at another lot, when Fern is sharply told by a guard that she can’t park and must leave, and she responds with an intimidated and defensive haste that she’s going.
“Nomadland” shows both the struggles of nomads of necessity, who lost their livelihoods, and of those who describe their nomadism in terms of a spiritual quest, an intentional rejection of settled ways of life and what they consider more conventional and more commercial, consumerist values. Fern’s nomadism seems to arise from an ambiguous combination of the two, and the motive behind her journey remains vague until late in the film, when it’s pinned to the screen like an index card. In an encounter with her sister Dolly (Melissa Smith) and her family at their posh suburban house, the two discuss a lifetime of what Dolly characterizes as Fern’s eccentricity, and what Fern herself considers a fierce and resolute drive for independence.
Zhao’s narrow method of fictional dramaturgy, which sticks to the functionally observational and avoids voice-overs, flashbacks, direct addresses, or other interpolations, forces the script—and the characters—into fabricated corners. And there’s a political side to this decision, too. Doubtless unintentionally, “Nomadland” is a movie born of both America’s and Hollywood’s working-class problem: the movie exalts the working class, but it doesn’t let working people present themselves; instead, they’re seen in relation to, and through the gaze of, Fern—which is to say, of McDormand, who isn’t just the lead actor but a real-life movie star. (What’s more, Fern’s mediating role has a basis in cultural difference—she’s the only character on the road who’s seen displaying book learning; a former substitute teacher and tutor of English, she recites from memory a Shakespeare sonnet.) Scene after scene of the nomads Fern encounters is punctuated and capped by Fern’s knowing, engulfing gaze, making her the film’s impresario of compassion.
The result is a movie that conveys the sense of aestheticizing disaster. The landscape, as seen in “Nomadland,” isn’t beautiful but picturesque—not discovered in images but seemingly chosen as décor, as sets. There are sunrises and sunsets, juicy orange sunballs on the horizon. The aesthetic is entwined with the melancholy of nostalgia. When the chances to make personal connections, or to acquire housing, present themselves, Fern chooses to head back to the road. Only in solitude and wandering can she remain steeped in her memories, in the feelings and the details of her life with Bo, in Empire, and of her distant past. Sitting alone in her van, Fern gazes longingly at old photos, and out at the wide and undeveloped spaces, and invites her past to dwell with her there. What Fern loved, she says, about the otherwise nondescript company-owned tract house that she and Bo lived in was its location, with nothing but desert visible from the window. The vast Western landscapes serve, in “Nomadland,” as natural symbols of that same past—the industrial past—that is Fern’s lost idyll, and, by extension, America’s; the road ahead of her leads backward. In the end, “Nomadland” delivers a liberal-libertarian longing for a vague, undefined, undetailed restoration of what was.
