[Nomadland is a piercing look into a country that’s becoming
less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy
about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant
portrait of a broken heart.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

NOMADLAND TURNS AMERICAN ICONOGRAPHY INSIDE OUT  
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Alissa Wilkinson
February 19, 2021
Vox
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_ Nomadland is a piercing look into a country that’s becoming less
and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy
about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant
portrait of a broken heart. _

Frances McDormand in Nomadland. , Searchlight Pictures

 

Certain metaphors structure the American imagination. The house with
the white picket fence, supposedly everyone’s dream. The cowboy,
setting out alone across the landscape, accompanied only by his
faithful horse and his ten-gallon hat. The pioneers, rolling in
rickety wagons across the prairie with all of their earthly
possessions, headed for a better life. The hard-working, self-made
man.

Each of these images stands in for an ostensibly American value:
adventure, courage, an entrepreneurial spirit, bootstrap-tugging, hope
that something better will always be just beyond the horizon. The idea
that the field is level and bounteous to all who are willing to work
— and, conversely, that the remedy for tough times is work.

_Nomadland_ evokes and rewrites these cultural themes by telling its
own story, one that counters the metaphors with reality. Based in part
on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book _Nomadland: Surviving
America in the Twenty-First Century_, and written and directed by
Chloé Zhao, it’s a piercing look into a country that’s becoming
less and less inhabitable for its older men and women, and more stingy
about who gets to dream. And, fundamentally, it’s a poignant
portrait of a broken heart.

Frances McDormand plays Fern, one of a growing number of American
seniors who find themselves, at the end of a long life of working
hard, with very little to show for it. Text at the beginning of the
film tells us that in 2011, faced with a declining demand for
sheetrock, US Gypsum shut its plant in Empire, Nevada, which had been
a company town for 88 years. Within six months, the town was decimated
— so thoroughly that its zip code was entirely discontinued.

[A woman carrying a lantern walks across a field at sunset.]

Frances McDormand in _Nomadland_.

 Searchlight Pictures

That’s all true
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and many of the people who populate _Nomadland_ are real, too.
It’s not a documentary, but it’s not really fiction,
either. Nearly everyone in the film
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themselves. When US Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, 95 jobs
evaporated. The company closed the town and told the workers who had
lived there that they had to leave, since the company owned the
houses, too. At one point, the place had an airport, a day care
facility, a public pool, a golf course. By mid-2011, it was a ghost
town.

Left with no option but to leave, Fern buys a large van, puts her
things into storage, and takes off down the winding road to an Amazon
warehouse. She and other seasonal workers will live in their vehicles
in an RV park and pack boxes during the busy holiday season as part
of the company’s CamperForce program
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over, they move on to the next job.

Fern’s friend Linda May tips her off to an annual gathering of
“nomads,” as the itinerant older seasonal workers call themselves.
It’s called the “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous,” led by Bob Wells,
who through his YouTube channel
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means has created a network of folks like Fern, who live in their
vehicles (Wells is a self-described “vandweller”) and move from
place to place. At the gathering, they break bread together, trade
things they don’t need anymore, and share techniques you need to
know if you’re living out of your car or van. How to protect
yourself. How to park discreetly in a city. How to best use a bucket
as your toilet. They don’t complain about what they don’t have;
they focus on their freedom from the “tyranny of the dollar.”

Thinking of this lifestyle as “freedom” — there’s another
American ideal — might take a little bit of the sting out of it for
the folks who, like Fern, did not exactly make the choice to have
almost no money. One woman at the Rendezvous talks about spending her
entire life working and raising her children, only to discover when
she reached her 60s that her social security benefit was a whopping
$550 a month. Fern knows hers won’t be enough to live on and seeks
steady work, but there’s simply no steady work to be had. Whether or
not she wants a home, her only choice is to live the nomad life.

The people around her have similar backstories; in the film, they’re
played mostly by people describing their actual lived experience. The
hybrid fiction-nonfiction form of storytelling (which Zhao last used
in her 2017 film _The Rider_) lets the nomad community tell its own
story in the midst of Fern’s, and mixes the sorrow and the joy with
authenticity and hard-won understanding.

It’s not all nonfiction, though; at the Rendezvous, Fern also meets
Dave (David Strathairn), and she keeps bumping into him in her
travels. They strike up a friendship. You start to think they might
strike up a romance. But this is not the kind of film that fulfills
expectations, and Fern is not the kind of woman who does, either.

[A man and a woman sit in lawn chairs eating dinner overlooking a vast
landscape.]

Frances McDormand and David Strathairn in _Nomadland_.

 Searchlight Pictures

_Nomadland_ is so understated, so sensitively crafted, that it
wasn’t until my second viewing that I understood something vital:
It’s mostly a movie about mourning and grief and loss. Fern’s
beloved husband died before Empire did. She has not fully processed
that grief, nor the cascade of losses that followed. At the
Rendezvous, Bob reminds Fern — who is tough and determined and
self-sufficient, just like a cowboy — that she has lost her husband,
her town, her “village,” her friends. “That kind of loss is
never easy,” he says.

All of the nomads have experienced some sort of loss. Fern’s is
acute, and McDormand keeps it sewn tight into her features. Fern
smiles and laughs, and she’s playful; she is kind to the people she
meets, and she seems, on the surface, to be happy alone. But her
aloneness is a shield against caring too much, against suffering loss
again. When you lose someone, it’s much easier to shut down and
never let anyone else in.

The landscapes against which Fern’s story takes place are
breathtaking and enormous — the cavernous emptiness and striking
peaks and sunsets of the American West. It’s a visual language that
most often shows up in Westerns, often to emphasize the smallness of
the human figures against the immenseness of the possibility.
In _Nomadland_, the same gorgeous landscapes emphasize the
chest-pinching loneliness of a life like Fern’s.

[A woman stands against the backdrop of the Badlands, with a small
smile on her face.]

Frances McDormand in _Nomadland_.

 Searchlight Pictures

Late in the movie, Fern’s sister, feeling the need to defend her
sibling against a pair of real estate agents who seem offended at
Fern’s suggestion that homeownership is not all it’s cracked up to
be, says she thinks that what the nomads are doing is like the
pioneers — that they’re “part of an American tradition.”
Fern’s face tightens just a little.

Because, yes, she is part of an American tradition. She is proud of
her self-sufficiency, her strength, the community that she is slowly
building. But she is also wounded and grieving the loss of a dream, a
community she once loved that disappeared because it was no longer
profitable to a big company. That’s an American tradition, too. So
is working hard your whole life only to discover that there’s no
more work for you, and that you can’t afford to live, either. That
the American Dream isn’t for everyone.

_Nomadland_ is achingly beautiful and sad, a profound work of empathy
from Zhao. It’s a true elegy, a lament for the dead, a yearning for
the lost. There’s no hint of sentimentality in Fern or
in _Nomadland_ — only a need to remember and to keep living. But
you can detect a hint of anger in the film at a country that, as Bob
puts it at the Rendezvous, could treat its working-class senior
citizens like “workhorses,” urged to labor hard, then simply used
up and put out to pasture. That they find community with one another
is necessary and good. But it doesn’t erase the great tragedy that
too often sends them out on the road in the first place.

Nomadland _is playing in select theaters and __streaming on Hulu_
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