Nomadland
Books | Films | Seaweed | Training
30 May 2021 -
Askøy
I enjoy a good documentary. I enjoy a good feature film with professional actors. Nomadland merges the two in a way I have not yet encountered. It's not a Borat film. The real people playing themselves know they are being filmed before the camera starts rolling and no one is being pranked. It's also not, like Drop Dead Gorgeous, a purely faux documentary. It's something different. And in that difference Chloé Zhao has created something truly beautiful and unique.
The arc of the story follows Frances McDormand's character Fern as she lives in a van and migrates across the western United States from job to job: Amazon worker for Christmas, Nebraska farmhand in the fall, waiting tables at Wall Drug through the summer, etc. Fern is also deeply scarred by the death of her husband and then the death of the town she lived in when the gypsum plant there closed. We see her inability to allow herself to become tied to a place or people as a effect of these scars. She does not entirely eshew human relationships, however, and she does seek out repeated connections with fellow nomads like Linda and Dave (who is played by the only other actor in the film). People like Dave and her sister present her with opportunities to settle down, but she choses not to. Is it out of the fear that such ties have failed her before? Or is it out of her love of the freedom of The Road? Zhao declines to give us an answer, allowing the viewer to decide for themself.
Cinematically the highlight is the big open scenery of the American West: the Badlands of South Dakota, the Wall, the basin and range, basin and range of Nevada, the High Desert, the Great Plains. The viewer is given a window into what everyone who's done a roadtrip through the West knows: America's vastness is beautiful. I myself have traveled alone there, sleeping in a van, and stopping to work where I can find wifi or in places tethered to my phone. In Colorado I found the beginnings of my own life as a digital nomad. Since then I have become less and less tied to a single place as my ability to work anywhere has allowed me to travel Europe and the US. So personally I strongly identified with this film. I've also visited many of those places with my kids. In particular the scenes in the campgrounds at the Badlands brought back many happy memories, which were particularly poignant since I haven't seen them much the past couple years because of the divorce and the coronavirus.
