Nomadland: Film Review

Cast: Frances McDormand, Gay DeForest, Patricia Grier

Director: Chloe Zhao

There's an authenticity to Chloe Zhao's Nomadland, an adaptation of the book by Jessica Bruder, that makes this tale of a nomad hard to shake.

McDormand plays Fern, a disenfranchised widower who moves from region to region in a van after the mining village she was part of in Nevada is essentially shut down and removed from the US map. Stripped of the place she used to call her home, Fern travels around in a beaten up old van that she's made up to be her safety zone.

Bruder's 2017 tome looked at transient older people in mid-west America, and Zhao's film easily taps into that. It helps that McDormand feels so natural in the role (possibly due to the months she spent living in a van prior in the name of research) and that all the extras who appear in the film's cast are nomads themselves.

Zhao's at pains to point out that Fern has chosen the lifestyle ("I'm not homeless, just house-less - it's not the same thing," she intones at one point) that has to a degree been thrust upon her. But Zhao's lens and cinematographer Joshua James Richards paints an all-too different picture with large swathes of the countryside shot in wide angles to emphasise the scope of the landscape, and internal shots taken in close up to emphasise Fern's comfort.

Equally, the Amazon warehouse where Fern resides as a seasonal worker is shot with vast amount of spaces around her, as if to push the point that Fern doesn't fully belong within the world she's forced to be part of.

McDormand lives and breathes the role, and never once feels like she's acting - it's all done on Fern's own terms, and it shows on screen. But there's an organic dignity running through this film that's hard to shake, and deeply compelling to watch.

At its heart, Nomadland is haunting, elegaic, and guaranteed to shake up your world view as a capsule of life in the 21st century, and the harsh economic realities faced by older Americans, it's disturbing. But bizarrely, it's beautifully hopeful, speaking to communities and connections of souls as Fern travels weaving in and out of people's lives as the days and roads lumber on.

Nomadland is the road trip 2021 deserves - a shake up reminder that our pasts and presents can collide in ways that are both freeing and frightening; it's a road movie of humans' innate desire for connection, but also strangely, of alienation.

Nomadland is simply unmissable; a film of layers and impressions rather than a normal narrative, it will stay with you long after its perfect final shot has faded from the screen.