Academy Award Best Picture nominee Nomadland is a sparse, poignant American story told through the eyes of a laid-off older white woman played with deft power by Frances McDormand. The Netflix film netted six Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for McDormand, and Best Director for Chloe Zhao. The accolades are richly deserved. In the era of Star Wars spinoffs and superhero universes, Nomadland tells a small story in an intimate way that somehow manages to get at the big ideas of modern American life with far more impact than its peers.
McDormand plays Fern, a longtime employee of a recently closed gypsum plant in the town of Empire, Nevada. Like so many ailing small communities, the residents of Empire were dependent on the plant for everything—their homes, their relationships, their financial life. When the plant closes and Fran’s husband dies, she is left with nothing. So she sets out on the road in a van to survive and to search for purpose. The viewer can decide whether Fern is fleeing something or seeking something, but her journey provides her with both solutions and challenges.
Nomadland joins a vaunted literary tradition of American odysseys, setting out on a journey to find something true about the American spirit. Jack Kerouac's On The Road may be the most celebrated of the genre, but there are so many others, like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy, especially The Big Money, even Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which offers a backstory of a drifter who dreams of better days. Films, including Academy Award winner Rain Man, have also used the American road trip as a backdrop to self-knowledge.
Set in 2011, but eerily resonant in our present time, the film’s cast deals with loss in a variety of ways. A man who comes into Fran’s life reunites with his estranged family and decides to give up his nomadic life. An older woman who realizes she will not live much longer celebrates the natural beauty of the American landscape. A young drifter who shares a cigarette with Fern worries that he can’t find the words to talk to his parents or his girlfriend. In a response that encapsulates the unexpected charm of the film, Fern responds to him with a Shakespearean sonnet.
The America depicted in the film is filled with decent people who have disconnected from the institutions that might have protected them in an earlier time. There is little mention of politics, but the seeds of resentment lurk in the background. The characters are good people whose flaw seems to be remaining too dependent on corporations that are whipped by the vagaries of the market. When the plant closes, there is no church, family, or government to rely on. So the characters take to the road.
Along the way, though driven by independence, Fern becomes a part of an ad hoc community of drifters, who look out for each other. She even becomes involved with a kind man who gives her little gifts and invites her to Thanksgiving dinner with his recently reconnected family. When he asks Fran to stay with him, she knows she cannot. She fears commitment, expectations, and ultimate disappointment. She leaves the warm loving home in a panic, and drives along the coast, getting out of her van to feel the wind, rain, and waves in her face. The freedom of the road has greater pull than community.
Nomadland grapples with these profoundly American issues of community, belonging, dignity and loss delicately and respectfully. Every American politician should see it. Preferably on the road, so that afterward they can embrace the seemingly boundless possibility of the wide American expanse together.
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‘Nomadland’ Is A Very Powerful, Very American Film - Forbes
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