In a performance that has her tipped as an Oscars favourite, Frances McDormand leads Chloe Zhao's Venice Gold Lion-winning Nomadland — a song of exile in which a 60-something widow takes to the open road, searching for home or something like it.
Set in a present day where the gig economy is simply an established fact and the American Dream has long gone to seed, Nomadland opens with the brief history of Empire, Nevada.
In a title card, we're told that the company-owned town was abandoned and its ZIP code "discontinued" after its sheetrock mine closed in 2011.
Like much of the film, this tale is lifted from Jessica Bruder's 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (which McDormand optioned, then reached out to Zhao to adapt and direct).
Which is to say, it's based in reality — though it could pass as allegorical, with so many towns and cities across America suffering similar fates in the wake of the country's post-industrial, post-GFC decline.
Zhao has transformed Bruder's work of investigative journalism into a big-hearted drama, inventing a fictional character, Fern (McDormand), to intersect with the lives of the people interviewed in the book, and to act as the film's emotional lodestone.
Fern is a character defined by loss. Following her husband's terminal battle with cancer, and the closure of the mine in Empire where they both worked, she has placed all her hopes (and capital) into her customised RV, which has left her "not homeless", as she tells a concerned former student, "just house-less. Not the same thing, right?"
She joins a pool of retiree-age cheap labour who drift precariously across the country, making a subsistence living through seasonal work.
We see her employed first in an Amazon warehouse. It's a cavernous hangar that rings with the endless beeping of barcode scanners, and which blights the surrounding Nevada desert like some kind of bleached alien monolith.
And yet the film observes its presence somewhat neutrally, neither pitying its workers, nor critiquing the conditions inside (Bruder's account is less forgiving).
Instead, Zhao's gaze seems fixed on what happens after we've arrived at this discombobulating place in time: how resilient people learn to adapt and survive. (There's an echo here of Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I.)
Things start looking up for Fern when she follows her friend Linda May (playing herself) to meet the VanDwelling internet guru Bob Wells (playing himself), who teaches them how to swap the rat race for life on wheels, with DIY survival tips and "the ten commandments of stealth parking".
Sporting loose jeans, a utility jacket and an uneven Jean Seberg pixie cut that she trims in a gas station toilet, McDormand slides into this makeshift community of nomads with ease.
Capped most recently by her Oscar-winning turn in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), she's steadily carved out a niche spot in Hollywood with her snappy, suffer-no-fools persona (see: Fargo, Laurel Canyon, Friends With Money or HBO's Olive Kitteridge).
Here, she turns down her star wattage to melt into the milieu, squatting to piss by a fence before even the opening credits roll.
Zhao gets heavy mileage from close-ups of McDormand: the familiar piercing blue eyes, the steely looks that soften to reveal a dimpled wry smile.
The weathered faces of the rest of the cast — who are made up of hugely charismatic, salt-of-the-earth, non-professional actors (an approach refined in Zhao's two previous features, though unlikely to continue with her forthcoming Marvel Studios debut, Eternals) — are equally expressive.
As Linda quips, "When you're old, you get personality."
The shiny exception — and one of a handful of elements that ruptures any possible documentary vibe — is the kindly drifter David (David Straithan, Good Night and Good Luck), whose conspicuous entrance announces a Potential Love Interest, and who reappears as Fern travels from job to job, flipping burgers and cleaning toilets, taking the scenic route through Nebraska, Arizona, South Dakota and Northern California.
Zhao crafts a vast, sweeping portrait of recession-hit America, whose wide reach connects to the broken bodies and busted dreams of her breakout hit The Rider (2017), and reveals yet another side to the great myths of the West.
As a slippery docufiction composed of many vignettes (also edited by Zhao), Nomadland focuses on those who have suffered and are now taking their self-described "healing journey" — AA members, cancer survivors, ex-corporate workers and Vietnam veterans with PTSD — whose raw stories are heard through Fern's ears and eyes.
In doing so, the film navigates a sticky line; McDormand never quite feels like a tourist gawking at the real lives of marginalised people, though she's often bathed in magic-hour light, accompanied by the sentimental strains of Ludovico Einaudi's piano and string arrangements.
Nomadland is at its strongest when it gently steps back to survey an America in arrears, in which Empires, literally, rise and fall.
With a welcome hint of the absurd, it presents this landscape as just another that is quietly fading. There's a pit stop by a lumbering 80-foot Brontosaurus statue, and a brief stint at the Badlands National Park, whose otherworldly rock formations have been eroding for 500,000 years.
Later, Fern heats up a can of Campbell's soup for dinner — no longer the symbol of a gleaming, bright future that Andy Warhol once canonised.
Instead of feeling sombre or sanctimonious, the film leans into a Malickian perspective that calmly pits the transience of human life against the eternal majesty of nature, as when Fern walks alone through a forest, a mere smudge beside the towering, centuries-old trees.
Perhaps most refreshing though is the film's clear-eyed interest in and acceptance of other ways of living, of different strokes for different folks — and not always out of economic necessity.
When Fern stops in to visit her sister at her prim suburban house, we too reel back with horror, having long settled into the company of moose and moths and mountain air, and the fragile peace of life on the road.
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Nomadland is in cinemas December 26 (for two weeks, then re-releases widely March 4).
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMicGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTEyLTI0L25vbWFkbGFuZC1maWxtLXJldmlldy1mcmFuY2VzLW1jZG9ybWFuZC1jaGxvZS16aGFvLWFtZXJpY2FuLXdlc3QvMTMwMTA5NzLSASdodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTMwMTA5NzI?oc=5
2020-12-23 19:47:00Z
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