About two-thirds through Nomadland, you come to suspect something about the protagonist, Fern (Frances McDormand). Maybe her spirit was always on the road and never satisfied with the tract house in the company town where she lived for many years with her husband?
But for most of Nomadland, Fern’s situation seems tragic. Her husband died, the company closed and the town went bust. She’s in the precarious state of many 60somethings who are too young to collect full Social Security benefits and too old to be hired professionally. She explains to the blandly benign young face behind the employment desk that she was in HR at the defunct company, she was a substitute teacher. Response: “I’m not sure what you’d be qualified for.”
And so she sleeps in her cramped vehicle at the Golden Lion RV camp, cooking on a hot plate and relieving herself in the camp latrine. “I’m not homeless. I’m just houseless,” she tries to explain. After a while, the Golden Lion outside her home town isn’t working out. Although she took a job at the Amazon distribution center, a hanger big enough for a fleet of jumbo jets, she can’t make ends meet. So it’s south to warmer climes, meeting up with dozens of other RV campers who from necessity or an itch for freedom from the grid have joined a fluctuating subculture of American nomads.
Nomadland is the latest by Chloe Zhao and like her previous films, Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), it displays an affinity for the American West and the lives of everyday people portrayed by everyday people. Nomadland includes a cast of RV nomads playing themselves, fronted by McDormand and supported by character actor David Strathairn as Dave, a gentle spirit who pursues a tentative relationship with Fern.
Several scenes feature real-life nomad advocate Bob Wells, whose YouTube channel Cheap RV Living provides advice for people living on wheels. He seems to have a social message about those “willing to work us to death and put us out to pasture.” His fireside audience are all 55s and up, many of them displaced by economic downturns. Also heard is a Vietnam veteran with PTSD who just wants peace and calm and a woman whose friend died before he could ever enjoy his life.
A quiet film, Nomadland moves at an unhurried pace that endows each frame with a sense of significance. Fern and her fellow travelers are often shot as small figures against immense landscapes, broad horizons, mountains. Fern is resourceful, never bitter, seldom angry and refuses to get discouraged despite many opportunities for discouragement. She remains enigmatic through the final scene, yet we learn about her in bits and pieces from occasional remarks and reminiscences.
Sometimes Fern and fellow nomads form tenuous communities, bartering goods and helping each other before the campers go their separate ways. Nomadland is ambiguous on whether they are dwellers in the ghost town of the American Dream or if they are the sons and daughters of the pioneers roaming the West in motorized covered wagons. Most appear, like Fern, to travel the roads alone in this strangely compelling narrative from the margins of contemporary life.
