Nomadland

 

NOMADLAND   ***1/2

Chloé Zhao

2020

IDEA:  When the sheetrock factory that sustains her small Nevada town is shuttered, a widow embarks on a soul-searching RV journey across the West, meeting up with other nomads along the way.

BLURB:  Although the main thrust of its narrative is catalyzed by the 2008 recession, Nomadland is less concerned with socioeconomic ordeals than existential ones. For Zhao as it has been for so many wonderers and wanderers before her, nomadism is a kind of cosmic state, a philosophical attitude and ideological position; even if it’s precipitated by personal loss or financial hardship, as it is for Frances McDormand’s Fern, it eventually grows into a spiritual identity. The majority of the real-life vagabonds we meet in the film embrace this concept of itineracy as a winding path of personal liberation, a means of casting off the shackles of grief, trauma, and oppressive cultural structures. The awesome grandeur and solitude of the American Western landscape are constants on this journey, the vast, vertiginous expanses simultaneously chastening and empowering. Whether at dusk or in the coruscating afternoon sunshine, Zhao and Richards take in these vistas with a becalmed reverence mirroring that of the characters, letting the natural openness quietly rebuff the closed-in, corporatized spaces of factories and strip malls. While the violent colonial legacy of the West is unspoken here, Nomadland nevertheless regards the land as much for its beauty as for its enduring sense of desolation and displacement, as a site where the possibility of salvation is always accompanied by a recognition of our transience, and where romanticized ideals of individualism are deflated by the need for community. And while it proves impossible to escape the dubiousness of an A-list Hollywood actor slumming it alongside the actually disenfranchised, McDormand almost miraculously assuages any dissonance with her generously receptive, unfussily empathic performance, absorbing the pain, dignity, and tenacity of her cohort without exploiting their circumstances. In the weathered faces and resilient voices of these self-invented nomads, Zhao materializes the primal, melancholy poetry of people in transit, at once alone and part of something eternal.