As I write this, the reviews for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which premiered earlier this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, are flooding in: mostly raves describing the film’s “tenderness” and “humanity” and staunch testimonials to Frances McDormand’s “quiet, self-effacing [lead] performance”. The day after its premiere, Nomadland received the Golden Lion for Best Picture from the Cate Blanchett-helmed Venice Film Festival jury, and it has just won TIFF’s ‘People’s Choice’ award. Google Nomadland today and the words “Oscar” and “Best Picture” litter the search results. Nothing about this is surprising – major autumn festivals often prompt Academy Award speculation – but something about the blandly effusive response to Nomadland feels disappointing given its rather superficial account of individuals impacted by the US recession. Although I feel a strong desire to participate in the excitement surrounding a film about a working class woman’s struggle in middle America, I am dogged by the feeling that Nomadland is being celebrated, at least partially, because of the politics it represents and the raw beauty of its road movie scenery rather than its profound or original storytelling.
At the beginning of Nomadland, we learn via intertitle that “On January 31, 2011, due to a reduced demand for sheetrock, US Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years. By July, the Empire zip code, 89405, was discontinued.” Soon after, we see Fern, a middle-aged widow and former substitute teacher, closing a storage locker and leaving Empire, the mining town where she and her late husband were once stably, if perhaps not gainfully, employed. Next the film follows her as she journeys across the western United States seeking seasonal work in her semi-dilapidated van. Along the way, she encounters a series of semi-tragic, yet consistently likeable, boomer-aged characters who have also experienced the harsh effects of the 2008 financial crash. Fern finds friend-cum-mentorship in seasoned van travellers like Linda May (played by the real nomad of the same name), an Amazon warehouse co-worker who explains that she once considered suicide upon learning she had racked up a mere $550 in social security benefits after a lifetime of work. Fern also gets taken under the wing of Swankie (acted by another real-life van dweller, Charlene Swankie), a sage RV dweller who responds to a brain cancer diagnosis by setting out for a final drive to Alaska to see the birds. Ten minutes into Nomadland, it’s clear to us that this won’t be an American working class redemption story à la Erin Brockovich, but rather a chronicle of temporary balms in lieu of salvation.
Early in the film, Zhao’s directing portends a clear-eyed look into midwestern angst and recession fallout. Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017), the high but inglorious stakes of Fern’s story fall squarely into the well-established genre of the long-suffering underdog. But whereas nonfiction texts often draw on genre associations with truthfulness – despite the inevitable artifice of selective memory, stylised descriptions, personal bias, and editing – a hyper-polished filmic representation of individual hardship prompts additional questions about narrative verisimilitude and purpose. Although a film like Nomadland is under no obligation to address the corporate and government predation that eroded midwestern industrial towns, Zhao’s picture basks in an eau de tragedie that would feel more impactful if hints of its poisonous origins – in some cases literally, as in certain toxic midwest resource extraction areas – and effects were more fully traced. Perhaps the urgency of Fern’s plight and the precarity of her position come across more clearly in Bruder’s book; in the film, these elements are noted, but somewhat diffused by an almost nonstop sequence of open road panoramas and grittily beautiful industrial sites. The distracting vistas, combined with the fact that Fern and her contemporaries are all essentially good humoured, non-threatening, and uncomplaining, make us almost forget that they are seeking alternative ways to live because their government has left them lacking homes, healthcare, or other forms of social safety, and that this could very reasonably inspire resentment.
Glimpses of citizen unrest and ennui do arise when Fern visits the ‘Rubber Tramp Rendezvous’, or ‘RTR’ as Linda May calls it, a meeting spot for RVers in Quartzite, Arizona. Fern travels to RTR to gain practical skills and learn more about van living from a guide named Bob (played by another real-life RV lifer, Bob Wells), an older, bearded man who dresses in layered plaid and a camouflage cap and proselytises about “the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar” and humans treated like “workhorse[s put] out to pasture”. Bob’s speech presents the most direct political commentary in the film, but his words are notably nonpartisan. His hesitation to point the finger at any single cause or political party might be telling – the RV fleet have presumably suffered under both Democratic and Republican governance and may have lost hope in change – but the relatively apolitical presentation of poverty nevertheless feels disappointing. The lack of schism, too, amongst Bob’s flock and their quasi-utopic dynamic feels overly simplistic. For the most part, the benevolent and mostly white characters are painted as almost perfect antiheroes trying to survive in a broken society. One wonders if Zhao or her producers were afraid to present poor characters as unlikable or not hardworking, or whether there were concerns that Nomadland’s mass market appeal (Oscars murmurs loom large!) could be negatively affected if characters evinced indicting or unpopular opinions.
For a film about people on the edge – anticipating bitter weather, unemployment, lacks of medical and social support, unexpected van breakdowns, and maybe even familial ostracism – Nomadland‘s keel is unnervingly even. It’s as though Zhao is championing human resilience by purposefully ignoring some of the darkness that inevitably arises in all communities: racism, exploitation, greed, gendered violence, and other forms of vulnerability and hopelessness. It’s not that Nomadland isn’t sad – it’s plenty depressing – it’s just strange that narrative conflict feels consistently handed down by the state or circumstances external to interpersonal dynamics. The people Fern meets aren’t always happy, but there’s a sense of quiet, martyr-like suffering that feels disconnected from the realities of upheaval, houselessness, and government neglect. While many of the accolades for Nomadland are true, or at least seem fair – McDormand is great, playing Fern’s careworn silences and moments of rare jouissance with gravitas, and the film’s subject matter is inarguably timely – its most compelling moments come from its rare flickers of earnest conflict and comfort. During an awkward dinner at Fern’s more upwardly mobile sister and brother-in-law’s home, the sister muses: “You know, I think the, um, what the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did. I think Fern’s part of an American tradition.” But Fern’s experience is wildly different than that of the pioneers’, because the film’s post-recession nomads reside in a developed and over-extracted America. They aren’t exploring the mythic west, but rather seeking a living in aggressively colonised spaces where opportunities have either dried up or are few and far between.
In his blurb, TIFF Director Cameron Bailey writes: “[Nomadland] gets into and out of every scene with rare economy, cutting to the heart of each moment in our growing understanding of Fern.” The scenes are indeed brief, a quick and dazzling succession of moments from Fern’s journey – one only wishes some of these snapshots were extended so audiences could sit longer with Fern’s fear, discomfort, and joy. Instead, we are frequently distracted by a maudlin piano score or quick cuts between scenic horizons. As such, moments showing Fern’s delight, as when recollecting life with her husband or moments spent in nature, bring us closer to a character whose depths remain a mystery. Over the course of the film, we are able to ascertain a sense of Fern’s circumstances, but more specificity around her and other characters’ daily struggles and successes would render Nomadland’s narrative much more real and engaging. Zhao strives to spotlight a protagonist making space for possibilities within a limited range of options; however, in overemphasising the beauty of Fern’s resilience and the views from her dashboard, the filmmaker regrettably occludes both a sense of depth and the essential messiness of context.
Esmé Hogeveen is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
