The big story of the start of the year was Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s soulful follow-up to 2017 breakout The Rider. That film received a belated UK release in May, a month after Nomadland swept the board at the Oscars, taking best picture, director and actress.
Both films see the Chinese director immersing herself in a rural American subculture so seamlessly that one would assume she’s always been there, an outsider who chooses to listen first with patience and grace. A loose adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book, it follows Fern (played by Frances McDormand), a widow whose home town has died, one of the many industrial fatalities of the 2008 recession. She’s been displaced (her town’s zip code was discontinued in 2011) and so decides to pack up, take her most important belongings with her in a van and go on the road.
The “houseless but not homeless” community that Fern encounters and slowly becomes a part of is one that, for many, will be fascinatingly new and in her process of revealing this under-reported world to us, Zhao employs real nomads to tell their stories alongside McDormand. Their involvement, and their words, help to ground the film, often making it feel like we’re switching between a documentary and a narrative feature (the breathtaking cinematography from Zhao’s three-times collaborator Joshua James Richards reminds us it’s the former).
Coming straight from Three Billboards, outsider art in all of the wrong ways, McDormand is remarkable, deftly ingratiating herself with those around her without ever seeming like an Oscar winner slumming it with normies, a turn as sensitive and as unpatronising as the film surrounding her. Her emotions are restrained but her predicament, told gradually and in fragments, is at first devastating and ultimately liberating, speaking not only to those who have been left gutted by corporate culture but also those who are single or childless or over 60 or seen in any way as “other”. It’s a film about regaining power after feeling powerless, not by taking on the system but by removing one’s self from it entirely (scenes of her briefly returning to “normal” society have us as anxious as she is for a return to the safety of her van and the freedom of the road).
Without overstating its themes, Nomadland subtly captures profound snapshot of America. The confines of a cruel economic infrastructure might limit the space for some people to exist yet the sheer expanse of the country allows them to find their own space instead.
