Chloé Zhao (2020)
Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2017, is a work of non-fiction. Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the book is harder to define. Nomadland, which screened at the London Film Festival after European and North American premieres at the Venice and Toronto festivals respectively, is technically a drama but its quasi-documentary aspect is more than a matter of style. Like the real-life people in Bruder’s account, most characters in the film are Americans travelling the country to find work. The cast members playing them actually are ‘nomads’ of this kind, not professional actors. Zhao’s screenplay may involve them in some fictional storylines but the performers concerned, to all intents and purposes, are being themselves. Each nomad character shares their name with the person taking the part. Except for one – Frances McDormand is a woman called Fern, and Zhao’s version of Nomadland is chiefly her story.
The nomads, in many cases, lost money and property in the 2008 financial crash. They drive from state to state, in the camper vans that are now their homes, looking for seasonal jobs – in the bars and kitchens of tourist spots, crop harvests, a vast Amazon warehouse on the run-up to Christmas. Fern and her husband, Bo, were residents of the town of Empire, Nevada, a place that economic change really has wiped from the map. On-screen text at the start of Nomadland explains that falling demand caused US Gypsum, which owned Empire, to close its plant there in 2011. Soon afterwards, the local ZIP code was discontinued. While her husband worked in the Empire gypsum plant, Fern did various jobs, including supply teaching and HR admin. Now widowed, she lives in a dilapidated van, though she’s made resourceful use of the small space and found room for a few cherished mementoes. Zhao’s narrative follows a little over twelve months in Fern’s nomadic existence, from shortly before one Christmas to just after the next New Year but one.
As a newcomer to this world, Fern acts as the viewer’s proxy. Most of the first hour of Nomadland (which runs 108 minutes in total) comprises a description of an unusual way of life, introducing individuals who typify it. Fern is assigned three mentors – Linda (Linda May), Swankie (Charlene Swankie) and Bob (Bob Wells). Like Fern, they, and others among the travellers, are senior citizens – a reminder of the demographic of many victims of the ‘Great Recession’. It’s natural to see these people as latter-day kin to the itinerant families in The Grapes of Wrath though some of them evidently prefer to keep on the move or are survivors of the 1960s counterculture: Bob Wells, for example, is a longstanding nomad and stalwart anti-capitalist. Nomadland, distinctive as a road movie through its focus on a persisting community, nevertheless reflects some standard features of the genre. The protagonist has a series of one-off or temporary encounters. The changing seasons and geography allow for sustained, expressive cinematography (by Joshua James Richards) of various landscapes. (The continuity of Ludovico Einaudi’s subtly emotive music, not written originally for the film, complements these visuals effectively.)
Frances McDormand isn’t the only acting pro in Nomadland. David Strathairn is Dave, a fellow traveller who takes a shine to Fern. Strathairn’s son, Tay, plays Dave’s son, James, whose unexpected appearance on the scene leads Dave to give up his peripatetic life. There’s a cameo from Cat Clifford, who has appeared in both of Chloé Zhao’s previous features, which include the widely-praised The Rider (2017). But McDormand is in nearly every scene and the success of the film doubly depends on her. She has to hold it together, and the audience’s attention. She also needs to harmonise with the non-actor cast she often shares scenes with. It’s probably fair to say that no American actress is better equipped than McDormand to take on this challenge, and the result is entirely successful. Regardless of the camera’s scrutiny, you never catch her doing anything phony. Even when Fern recites from memory ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (the whole sonnet), the result is fresh, deeply felt and not in the least actorly. In this role, McDormand, not for the first time, illuminates apparent ordinariness, makes uncomplaining decency compelling.
The later stages of the film, which concentrate increasingly on Fern, have a more conventional shape. She develops a wary, low-key friendship with Dave. His son suddenly turns up while both are working at Wall Drug in South Dakota – Dave as a chef, Fern waiting tables. It transpires Dave is now a grandfather; a while later, he decides to move in with James, his wife and their baby. Dave’s very keen for Fern to visit, which she does for the family’s Thanksgiving celebrations. He clearly wants her to stay for good but he must realise, as the audience does, that’s not going to happen. By now, Fern prefers her cold camper to the warm bedroom on offer in James’s house. She takes her leave early one morning before anyone else has surfaced.
When her van breaks down, she can’t afford the repair bill and visits her younger, married sister Dolly (Melissa Smith) to ask for a loan. The meeting also yields more of Fern’s backstory, for which this viewer was by now hungry. According to Dolly, Fern always had itchy feet when they were growing up: she left their parents’ home at the first opportunity. She then met, wed and settled down with Bo, to spend decades in the same house in the same town. The implication that childless Fern’s inherent wanderlust has returned since she lost her irreplaceable husband is credible. Near the end of the film, Fern makes a melancholy pilgrimage to what used to be Empire, Nevada – a ghost town in a vividly immediate sense – and her home there. After jettisoning further possessions, she drives off to her next destination. The closing titles are preceded by Chloé Zhao’s dedication of the film to the people it’s about, concluding in a phrase used several times in the course of the story, ‘See you down the road’.
Nomadland has already won the Venice Golden Lion and the Toronto audience award. It looks set for plenty more prizes, probably including a third Best Actress Oscar for Frances McDormand. The film is impressive both technically (Zhao herself did the fluent editing) and thematically. It’s difficult to fault on its own terms but I must confess to finding it increasingly hard work and eventually frustrating. While it’s good to see a film-maker well disposed towards her characters, Zhao’s liking for hers comes at the cost of their human complexity (with the qualified exception of Fern). Zhao very reasonably sees the nomads as a group living at the margins of society whose story it’s vital to tell. But her sympathy and admiration deprive them of flaws or mixed motives, and denude the narrative of chafe and conflict. No one seems to have an alcohol problem or utters a word of bad language. David Strathairn, like McDormand, integrates skilfully with the non-professional cast but I wished he’d had the chance to go beyond that. Fern’s three mentors, and other nomads, are arresting camera subjects. Each in turns says her or his piece but I wanted know more about them. If this film was a genuine documentary, the director would have wanted – might well have demanded – the same.
When Dave hastily picks up a cardboard box containing Fern’s treasured china, the bottom falls through and crockery smashes on the ground: it’s almost a relief when Fern is briefly angry. On the visit to her sister, she disagrees with Dolly’s husband and his friends as they talk about the housing market. Here too, you’re grateful just that the heroine has raised her voice – though Chloé Zhao probably means us to feel, rather, that Fern has got her sense of priorities right and the men concerned haven’t.
‘Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man’
I’ve always found the vision of ‘Imagine’ off-putting. The opening words, ‘Imagine there’s no heaven’, lead into description of a wanly monotonous world that calls to mind traditional complaints about heaven (sitting on a cloud playing a harp all day must be boring, etc). As a piece of drama, Nomadland is something of a cinematic equivalent to ‘Imagine’. Also like John Lennon’s song, it could become a classic.
16 October 2020
