Nomadland
2020
Directed by Chloé Zhao
Based on ‘Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century‘ by Jessica Bruder
Produced by Frances McDormand and Peter Spears
Screenplay by Chloé Zhao
Edited by Chloé Zhao
Music by Lodovico Einaudi
Currently on Disney + STAR
CAST
Frances McDormand – Fern
David Strathaim as David
Linda May as Linda May
Swankie as Swankie
Charley Wells as Charley Wells
Academy Awards:
Best Director
Best Film
Best actress
The non-fiction book was published in 2017, and Frances McDormand and Peter Spears optioned the rights, and chose Chloé Zhao as director (co-producer, editor, screenwriter!) They filmed it over four months in late 2018, and the “editing” credit suggests that much was filmed with the real people who make up the cast (non-professional actors in IMDB speak) and that editing and assembling the material was the major task.
The IMDB cast list names hundreds of extras, one by one (I’ve never seen that before), as well as the massive “non-professional cast.” Three major roles … Charley Wells, Linda May and Swankie were real people, or playing themselves or non-professionals. Not that they are simply “playing themselves” as Swankie dies in the film, but then attended the Academy Awards ceremony with Linda May as Chloé Zhao’s guests.
It’s innovative and also disconcerting in that it sits somewhere between a fiction film and a BBC Panorama documentary. Frances McDormand plays a character, Fern, who is omnipresent. There are no scenes without her. The rest revolves around her and the narrative line is tenuous. Mainly, people are real. McDormand has to urinate and defecate (explosively) on screen. To get the feel of reality, the director and principals lived in RVs (Recreational Vehicles) throughout making the film.
Fern is a loner. Her husband has died, in Empire, Nevada, and she has taken to the road in an RV rather than stay in the house … this is choice. She later visits the empty house and clears her stuff from it. The cast are nomads, living in RVs, all past middle-aged, veering to elderly. We start at an Amazon warehouse or “Fulfillment Centre”. It’s pre-Christmas, I guess, so there are seasonal employees living in RVs in an area paid for by amazon. When the work is over, the free spot will become $375 a month.
She moves South to Arizona, where Charley Wells tries to create a nomad community, which I suppose is early in the year, to escape the cold by stopping in Arizona. Then it’s up to South Dakota to work in a Badlands theme park and a shopping mall restaurant. She has a $2300 repair bill on her RV, and has to take a bus to get the money from her settled sister. She is friendly with fellow Nomad, David, and later goes to visit him in California, where he has gone to live with his son and family as a happy settled grandpa. She’s invited to stay in the luxurious house but goes back on the road. People run into each other again, and the line is ‘See you down the road.’ No drama, no real narrative.
It’s a new Grapes of Wrath, except the dispossessed Okies were in family groups trekking to California. Itinerant work has persisted to this day, with teams moving south to north for harvesting. The nomads in this film also follow the seasons … working for amazon before Christmas, picking up trash in a theme park in summer.
The American Western landscape has starred in many films. Here, ranging from Nevada to Arizona and South Dakota and the California coast, it is bleak, inhospitable, mainly downright ugly. I’ve driven at least one of those roads twice, on the way to Death Valley (I love Death Valley). The road runs parallel to an unbroken line of low grey mountains. I believe it’s still a narrow strip of California, though it looks and feels like Nevada. I’ve driven across Arizona too, but in my case, once it was after unprecedented rains and the desert was in glorious flower. I’ve done the Coastal Highway in California (which usually looks much more pleasant!) I was transfixed staring through an aircraft window at North and South Dakota. That is bleak country.
Then there is the ghost town aspect. When the mine runs out, Americans move on. There are boarded up streets in areas of the UK, but not the wholesale abandoning of places as in the USA. Move on. Fern’s home was Empire, Nevada. According to Wiki it was based on gypsum mining. It reached its maximum population of 750 in the 1960s and is now (2021) home to a population of 65. Fern’s old house is empty, and it looks as if the neighbouring houses are empty too. In 2011, the gypsum plant closed, and residents in company houses were allowed to stay to the end of the school year then evicted. The population reduced to two. In 2016 the mine was bought and partially re-opened, hence the current 65. Wiki says the story is set in 2011 (though there was no signal of that).
Older people in America have to work. They work in stores and restaurants to an extent unusual in the UK. People take to the roads because they can’t afford to live in houses. Tellingly, we don’t encounter couples in the film, though there surely must be some. They’re loners. So the nomads are not like travelling Romany families and communities in the UK, nor New Age Travellers, doing the rock festival circuit (what happened to them under Covid lockdown?) It would be smug, as some UK reviews have it that “It doesn’t happen here.” It does, but the scale is different. I could show you three camper vans within a mile or two of my house in Poole that look like homes. They’re not particularly nomadic though. They stay on roads close to woodland, or the cliffs. Local bye-laws forbid camping in vans on the streets (bad for tourism and hotels), but in these cases the police turn a kind and blind eye. One started parking in a nearby road, and I heard the resident of the camper van was quietly told not to park directly outside people’s houses. Now it’s usually parked quietly rusting by woods next to the Chine. Alan Bennett wrote about an elderly woman in a van outside his house in the book and film The Van.
It’s garlanded with awards. It’s moving. It’s thought provoking. It had us discussing it at length. Would I have voted for it in the awards? Mainly not. Best Director, maybe. I persist in my view that a great movie has people queuing in the rain on a Saturday night to see it. Alright, that’s out of date. Put it another way. I would have been in a dilemma between choosing The Dig and The Man In The Hat as the Best Movie of 2020. I watched both twice through, and bits of the Man In The Hat a third time. I will buy them on Blu-ray, and I will watch them again. Much as Nomadland was innovative and extremely thought-provoking, I just can’t see me pulling a blu-ray off the shelf, and saying ‘Let’s watch this again.’ It’s on Disney + Star and part of their move to more adult and serious fare.
I hadn’t read the book and was surprised that the story it wasn’t particularly political. It was about loneliness rather than capitalist loathsomeness. It differed in that respect to The Grapes Of Wrath. The Joad family were unwelcome whenever they met ‘locals’. Locals in Nomadland helped.
Very moving. Bob Wells’ vignette speaking of his son’s suicide was tear jerking. I wouldn’t rush to watch it again but that’s more about me than the quality of the film. Certainly up there for me as a film of the year (along with The Man In The Hat, but not The Dig).
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The other great “Okie” scene is in Bonnie & Clyde, where they are helped and looked after by the travelling group.
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The nomadic seasonal workers are are called ‘workampers’, according to journalist Emily Guendelsberger in her book “On The Clock”. Their contribution to the seasonal ‘peak’ is built into the Amazon business plan. Other seasonal work includes harvesting various crops in season and for the young and hearty, working the canneries in Alaska during the salmon season. Ms. Emily recommends Jessica Bruder’s book, which I have not read, but her own is an interesting personal examination of working conditions in the New Economy.
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