Review: Nomadland

There are times in Chloé Zhao’ s Nomadland where Frances McDormand’s face, lined and desperate, wistful and stoic seems to peer in from America’s Dust Bowl past to haunt its recent history. She has been developed from Dorothea Lange’s iconic photograph, Migrant Mother to gaze again on a country forsaken by the very God who supposedly found it. This is a figure who wears the weight of her three Academy Awards for acting well, quietly manoeuvring into Meryl Streep’s shoes whilst staring into America’s soul.

McDormand is Fern, a van dweller forced into the itinerant life when her middle-class life collapsed in 2011 after the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada closes and with it an entire town is wiped from the map in name and zip code. The physical remnants, houses and possessions still litter the landscape, a mass exodus in the face of ravenous capitalism, the death throes of the financial crisis of 2008 laid bare for the world to see, but no one is watching. Disillusioned, these are the people who may have turned to Trump in 2016, but Fern seeks something pure. Her freedom.

Much of Zhao’s film unfolds in dreamlike montage, part Terrence Malik, part Andrei Tarkovsky, part Ken Loach. Fern drifts through the American continent, through the awesome scope of snow dunes and vast desert, through the man-made cathedrals of Amazon and the fleets of mobile communities that swarm silently across a country that has all but forgotten them. They are benign road warriors from a pacifist Mad Max film.

Zhao and McDormand cast these communities with dignity and nobility, the ingenuity and integrity of Fern’s fellow travellers is beyond reproach and is to be admired, yet Christmas lights and Tardis-like storage options for the vans are quaint, even cute. But this harbours a darker truth that Nomadland fails to acknowledge: there is no nobility in poverty. For a much-lauded director and successful actor to live the nomad life is admirable, to bring it to the screen is worthy but not to confront the cause, to veer away from the ideals of Third Cinema at times seems at best a missed opportunity and at worse unforgiveable.

Fern walks by a cinema that is showing The Avengers, at once placing Nomadland in 2012, Marvel’s then-growing hegemony the direct antithesis to Zhao’s film and McDormand’s persona. However, the irony that Zhao is directing Marvel’s Phase Four film, The Eternals should not be lost. Zhao should certainly take her opportunity to ascend the MCU summit but as beguiling her direction of Nomadland is, and as mesmerising as McDormand’s performance is, we are left with the impression that Fern is not the only member of a dying breed that is slowly running out of time. Disney’s latest juggernaut of a trailer highlighting its relentless roster of MCU movies threatens to run films like Nomadland off the road. That Searchers ending seems poignant for Fern and independent film alike.