Fall movie seasons past are littered with a particularly irksome kind of prestigious pandering: movies in which some shiny star strips themselves of glam and glow to play a Real Person. We are meant to praise them for their bravery, but so often the proper reaction is to roll one’s eyes and move along, leaving the star and their deceptive preening to the eddy of their insistent vanity.
Sometimes, though, the right actor, working with the right filmmaker, can maneuver through most of the medium’s inherent artifice and hit something close to real. Or, at least, real as perceived by an audience member like myself, someone possessed of their own prejudices and assumptions. This is all a long way of saying that some audiences may, fairly, feel that Chloé Zhao’s new film Nomadland, premiering at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals, is just another bit of movie star tourism. To me, though, the film has an almost objective compassion, a plain and patient understanding of where life may take an American, far from the relative comforts of moviemaking.
The movie star here is Frances McDormand, who has not exactly made a career of tripping the light fantastic in fabulous luxury. Still, she’s a famous person with considerable resources at her disposal who, in Nomadland, plays an itinerant worker who lives in a van, roaming across the American West. Ironically enough, what the film does best is what brings it closest to criticism: Zhao’s brand of docu-realism suggests something soberly true. Rather than dressing the film up in the safely recognizable trappings of awards-movie schmaltz, Zhao and McDormand dial in, observing and listening to the just-real-enough world surrounding McDormand’s character, Fern.
McDormand did some work at an Amazon fulfillment center while making the film. She also spent some time sleeping in Fern’s van, which she has named Vanguard. (An unfortunate, and accidental, association with the currently airing HBO documentary about the NXIVM cult.) From some perspectives, McDormand could be just another dilettante actor mistaking Method for meaning. But Nomadland, which is really more character study than surveying sociology, approaches Fern’s circumstances, and those of the people she encounters on her travels, with a fluid, un-judging sensitivity. There is nothing cold nor analytical about Zhao’s gaze, nor McDormand’s. They have arrived at these places to learn, and to tell a story, and to be moved by their subject. Which is maybe the best intention we can hope for when some version of Hollywood comes calling to gaze in on downtrodden communities.
Throughout Nomadland, Fern communes with a variety of people, mostly all older, who are spending their latter years either living on meager pensions or, like Fern, seeking out temporary work. Many of the people who appear in the film are living this way in the actual world, and they share their experiences and insights with Fern—and, thus, with Zhao, and with us—with a weary pride. The nomads of the film are living a principle, shaking off the amoral and often cruel strictures of gridded life as much as they can. They revel in the sprawl of the landscape and in the small and profound pleasures of human connection.
Still, loneliness laps at the edges, as most of these wanderers, including Fern, know that for much of the time they will be on their own, headed off to somewhere else, the solitary in-between their only constant. It would be easy to frame Fern’s restlessness as a chase after something, but as Nomadland wends along toward its hushed finale, McDormand and Zhao compellingly articulate that Fern’s journey isn’t a pursuit at all. She’s not fleeing anything, either—though there are painful memories of the shuttered industry town where she and her late husband lived. Nomadland instead allows Fern the grace of complicated motivations. She is a loner but by no means a misanthrope, a displaced person who nonetheless has a firm command of herself.