[The quiet drama Nomadland makes a lot of sense for this strange
Oscars year.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

BEST PICTURE WINNER NOMADLAND DOESN’T JUST TELL A STORY ABOUT
AMERICA. IT EMBODIES IT.  
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Alissa Wilkinson
April 26, 2021
Vox [[link removed]]

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_ The quiet drama 'Nomadland' makes a lot of sense for this strange
Oscars year. _

Frances McDormand as Fern in Nomadland, which won Best Picture at the
2021 Oscars., Searchlight Pictures

 

I wish I’d seen _Nomadland_
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a theater, for reasons that didn’t become clear until the second
time I saw it.

I wish I’d seen _every_ movie nominated for Best Picture this
year
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a theater. But the only one I saw in that setting was _Minari_, when
it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, and the
world felt chaotic but still familiar. I watched _Nomadland _on my
TV, in my house, like every other movie I’ve seen for the past 14
months.

I dearly hope we emerge from this awful period in our lives with
expanded accessibility to films for everyone — including audiences
who can’t or for a variety of reasons prefer not to go to the
theater. But Best Picture winner _Nomadland_ begs for a big screen.

RELATED

7 winners and 4 losers from the deeply eccentric 2021 Oscars
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_Nomadland_ was considered a Best Picture frontrunner almost from the
start of this extra-long awards season
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When I first saw it (at its Toronto International Film Festival
“premiere,” in my living room, in September), I thought it was a
movie about a woman who finds a new community after her existing one
is literally dismantled.

The real-life town of Empire, Nevada, was built and sustained by US
Gypsum for 88 years. But when the sheetrock market declined and the
company pulled out, the entire town was simply shut down.

Those who lingered until the end faced a different world from the one
in which a corporation might provide a stable, affordable, loving
place for its employees and their families. They could find somewhere
else to live, maybe move in with a relative, hope to find some kind of
work somewhere eventually. But Fern, McDormand’s character, a widow
who now has to leave her home, chooses not to trust anyone with her
love or her life. Now she is a seasonal worker at Amazon, and Wall
Drug, and the beet harvest, and various campgrounds. And she lives in
her van.

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

Frances McDormand and David Strathairn in _Nomadland._ 

Searchlight Pictures

Better not to become too attached to anything, and thus risk having
your heart broken again.

_Nomadland_ touched a nerve with people who had lived that story.
After I reviewed the film
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I received a number of emails from people in late middle age and older
who had found themselves in similar situations. Widows and widowers.
Folks who had worked all their lives, only to find when they reached
retirement age that the bottom they’d counted on had dropped out.
People who suddenly couldn’t find steady work, or who watched their
beloved hometowns empty out around them; they weren’t destitute,
they had options, but this wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

That realization is filled with shame in a country that assumes if you
stumble on hard times it’s probably because you’re lazy,
profligate, or thoughtless. For many of the people I heard
from,_ Nomadland_ seemed to have handed back some dignity. It
suggested, in its storytelling, that they’d been seen.

RELATED

Nomadland turns American iconography inside out
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The second time I watched _Nomadland_, I realized that not only was
it telling that story — the tale of a woman overwhelmed by grief who
responds by fortifying the walls around her heart — but
also _showing_ that story. It’s set mostly in the West, with Fern
driving her white van (which she names “Vanguard”) through rugged
mountains and flat, wide plains. She crosses sunsets and sits around
campfires. She drags her lawn chair out to the edge of a cliff and
sits with a friend, admiring the view.

Somehow these were the images that revealed _Nomadland_ as a movie
not just about being afraid to love, but about the mourning and grief
that make love so hard. The beauty posed a stark contrast with
Fern’s journey, filled with tiny indignities that are nobody’s
fault in particular: having to use a bucket as her latrine, asking for
favors from strangers, watching her favorite dishes get accidentally
broken. Everything is magnified when you are mourning.

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

Frances McDormand in _Nomadland_.

 Searchlight Pictures

The worst indignity comes late in the film, when Fern visits her
sister in her comfortable suburban home. In defense of Fern, her
sister tells a pair of real estate agents — who are horrified when
Fern suggests homeownership might not be the greatest thing in the
world — that what the “nomads” are doing is like what the
pioneers did. “They’re part of an American tradition,” she says.

Fern’s sister means well, but that line is far from _Nomadland_’s
thesis. Fern’s face tightens when she hears it. That’s not to
discount the beauty in Fern’s journey; she gets the sunsets and the
plains and the mountains. But there’s nothing inherently noble about
why she’s living this life in the first place. If her experience on
the road is part of an “American tradition,” it’s a tradition of
finding yourself struggling because you no longer fit into a young,
productive workforce, and choosing the only alternative that still
feels like living.

RELATED

On Nomadland, the Oscars, and that Amazon question
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And _Nomadland_’s director and writer Chloé Zhao — who in
winning Best Director for the film became only the second woman ever
to win the Oscar for directing
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and the first nonwhite woman to win the category — seems to have
sensed that continuum. The reason I wish I’d seen _Nomadland_ on
the big screen is that Zhao’s film echoes the visual vocabulary that
says “America,” as painted in perhaps that most American of
genres: the Western, with its vistas, sunsets, and silhouettes. It’s
familiar, and it quietly beckons us to consider how Fern’s life is
like the idealistic version of the frontier that the movies have shown
us on the silver screen in the past. Then it invites us to notice how,
for Fern, things are very, very different.

“Please watch our film on the largest screen
possible,” _Nomadland_ star and Best Actress winner Frances
McDormand said as she thanked the Academy for selecting the film as
its 2021 Best Picture winner. “And one day very, very soon, take
everyone you know into a theater, shoulder to shoulder, in that dark
space. And watch every film that is represented here tonight.”

I don’t know if the echoing and gentle inversion of Hollywood’s
visual vocabulary is what Oscar voters saw in _Nomadland_, or if
it’s why they chose the film to represent the industry in this odd,
frustrating, painful, grief-filled year. It may just be that they felt
something watching it.

But I do know that its intimacy and quiet refusal to fit prescriptive
boxes felt like a good fit for these Oscars. And I hope, as soon as
I’m able, that I can go see it on the same screen where America’s
stories have been told on those wide-open plains in the past — and
need to be told with truth in the future, too.

Nomadland _is playing in theaters and __streaming on Hulu_
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