Nomadland
Chloé Zhao’s Academy Awards frontrunner is a moving story that follows one woman (Frances McDormand) and her unique approach to life in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis.
‘A nomad is a member of a community without fixed habitation which regularly moves to and from the same areas’
- Collins English dictionary
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is part-road movie, part-documentary, following the fictional story of Frances McDormand’s Fern as she deals with her own personal economic turmoil in post-financial crisis America. We meet Fern in the run up to Christmas, working a temp job packing Prime parcels in an Amazon fulfilment centre whilst living in her van on spare ground nearby – this area is designated for Amazon employees, meaning that this living situation is not unique to Fern and is the reality for so many people getting by in the gig economy world. This lifestyle is relatively new to Fern – she previously lived and worked in Empire, Nevada, with her husband, a town built to house the workers of the nearby US Gypsum megafactory which produced construction materials. The 2008 Financial Crisis caused US Gypsum to close the factory and by 2011, the town housing the workers and their families was empty. Not just empty, but empty – the zip code was discontinued because literally nobody lives there. After the seasonal work packing Amazon’s Christmas deliveries ends and the sinking realisation of what next sets in, Fern acts on the recommendation of a fellow warehouse worker and travels to Arizona to join a community of nomadic travellers, led by Bob Wells. Nomadland takes us on a journey of sprawling landscapes and hazy sunsets as Fern integrates herself in to the group and adopts the nomad way of living.
While Fern’s journey is fictional, the nomads and their stories are not. Aside from the familiar-faced character actor David Strathairn, the rest of the characters are played by non-actors portraying semi-fictional versions of themselves. They use their own names, wear their own clothes, and are seen beside their own real-life RVs. They tell Fern of their hobbies and experiences on the road. The detail of the US Gypsum factory closure and Empire’s zip code discontinuation that appear in the film’s title card is also factual – real people have been displaced by the closure that is used as the catalyst for Fern’s change of lifestyle. Using real people gives Nomadland a documentary feel – the kind of story you would expect to see in a non-fiction film, but uniquely told through the lens of cinematic widescreen bliss with McDormand as the focal point that connects the other nomads.
As we now embark on our own nomadic journey through awards season, Nomadland is the vehicle that may see two women make history. Chloé Zhao – having already become the first Asian woman and only the second woman ever to win the Golden Globe for Best Director – is the first non-white woman to be nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards, and is one of two women nominated this year (another first at the Oscars – the other being Promising Young Woman’s Emerald Fennell). Zhao is the current frontrunner for the award, which should shock absolutely no-one given Variety recently confirmed that ‘with 34 awards season trophies for directing, 13 for screenplay and nine for editing, Chloé Zhao is the most awarded person in a single awards season in the modern era’. History indeed.
The second of Nomadland’s women currently on course for a historic achievement is Frances McDormand. We already know that she is consistently brilliant in virtually any role that she chooses to play, though traditionally McDormand is best remembered for parts that sit somewhere within the quirky/whacky spectrum – her Coen Brother collaborations with her husband and brother-in-law, or in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri being the roles that live long in the memory. Her defiant-yet-helpless performance as Fern threatens to propel her to a peerless, exclusive club for living female actors – she is the favourite for this year’s Best Actress Oscar, which would take her on to three wins and above the likes of Meryl Streep, Ingrid Bergman, Jodie Foster and Jane Fonda (who all sit on 2 each). Winning the award would put her only second behind Katharine Hepburn, on 4, yet it doesn’t feel like McDormand is generally held in as high regard as some of those other names. Streep, for example, has been nominated for Best Actress a mindboggling 17 times in the 44 years since her first film appearance – a nomination every two and a half years and clearly an achievement in itself, so it’s understandable that they are looked upon slightly differently. Then again, before this year McDormand had been nominated twice and won both times, and is now going for the hat-trick. It’s tough to decide what is more impressive, but in the words of DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort – ‘I don’t ask to be judged on my winners, I ask you to judge me on my losers because I have so few’. Food for thought.
A product of being a nomad is that you live a simple life, and in many ways Nomadland is a simple film. Zhao’s film excels as a showcase for life on the road, travelling across the sprawling plains of America and experiencing the slow change to the landscape from season to season. The decision to shine a light on the non-actor nomads as much as McDormand means that this was never going to be a traditional three-act story arc with twists and turns, but it serves as a document for this unique way of life that a traditional documentary would have probably failed to capture. As the seasons pass and Fern finishes another Christmas stint at the same Amazon fulfilment centre as the previous year, you feel a sense of the motto that the nomads live by – it’s not a goodbye, only a see you down the road.