TIFF 2020 Film Review: Nomadland
Chloé Zhao’s spellbinding Nomadland captures the lost voices of America
A vérité mix of fiction and documentary, Chloé Zhao’s enthralling Nomadland captures a lost sliver of American life. Frances McDormand is astounding as the understated Fern, bringing a quiet dignity to one of the most soulful performances of the year. Adapted from Jessica Bruder’s book, Nomadland jettisons melodrama and traditional narrative tensions, choosing instead to explore life on the road with lightly-fictionalized versions of real-life nomads. A graceful elegy and a hopeful portrait, Nomadland - like Zhao’s The Rider before it - is a new standard for the American western.
If there’s one film that has dominated the conversation during this year’s odd and abbreviated festival season, it’s Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland. Serving as the undeniable centerpiece for the Venice, Toronto, and New York festivals, the film has captivated its awards-scrying audience by netting the Golden Lion at Venice as well as the People’s Choice at TIFF. This shouldn’t be a surprise - Nomadland is terrific. Zhao, in perfect lockstep with star Frances McDormand, paints a layered and complex picture of a forgotten America, reflecting the vagabond ethos with all its somberness, vibrancy, and optimism.
“I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless,” says Frances McDormand’s Fern. A 60-something widow in economically devastated Nevada, Fern hits the road when the gypsum mine that employs much of her town’s inhabitants closes down. Living out of her RV, she works seasonally at an Amazon distribution facility, but once the holidays pass, Fern takes to roaming the American West, meeting and mingling with encampments of fellow wanderers. Much like its spiritual predecessor - The Rider - which depicted the actual lives of Indigenous rodeo cowboys in South Dakota, Nomadland straddles the line between dramatic narrative and documentary. Translating Jessica Bruder’s written pages into resonant cinema, Zhao populates her story with mentors for Fern, enlisting real-life nomads like Bob Wells, Charlene Swankie, and Linda May to play embellished versions of themselves.
“[Chloe] Zhao…paints a layered and complex picture of a forgotten America, reflecting the vagabond ethos with all its somberness, vibrancy, and optimism.”
A stickler for neorealism, Zhao gets straight into the heart of a wanderer’s life. Set within the open, monolithic landscapes of the West, Nomadland teems with authenticity; by discarding manufactured melodrama and traditional storytelling tensions, the film feels more like measured revelation than intrusive voyeurism. For these wayward Americans, Zhao paints with a brush that strokes in neither pity nor exaltation, alternatively offering a depiction that captures both the loneliness and freedom of nomad life. Through this lens and the film’s stunningly natural performances, Nomadland distills the essence of a people that have become unmoored from mainstream America - and even with a narrative that practically demands it, the film resists glib injections of politics or reductive pathologizations, instead applying a cinematic perspective of great empathy. Far away from her portrayal of the foul-mouthed Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Frances McDormand is simply astounding as Fern. Displaying a quiet solemnity peppered with frustration, vulnerability, and toughness, McDormand fits in perfectly among her nonprofessional cohorts.
To be on the wavelength of Nomadland is to be subsumed by Zhao’s mastery of tone and narrative economy. There is an ebb and flow that mimics the station of the film’s subjects: We follow Fern as she slowly navigates this way of life - watching “beginner” nomad YouTube videos, attending Bob Wells’ real-life Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, and reflecting on life with the inimitable Caroline Swankie. Days become weeks become months, seasons change, and with the film’s always-shifting settings, we’re entangled with Fern and her life on the road. And while there is a hint of light romance in the form of Dave (David Strathairn, wonderfully understated as one of the only other characters in the film played by an actor), the heart of Nomadland remains in Fern’s interactions with real-life nomads. From Swankie’s staggering monologue about her own mortality to Bob Wells’ mournful yet hopeful meditation on grief, the film is full of a lived-in grace.
“For these wayward Americans, Zhao paints with a brush that strokes in neither pity nor exaltation, alternatively offering a depiction that captures both the loneliness and freedom of nomad life.”
It also helps that Nomadland is straight up gorgeous. Here, Zhao reunites with her cinematographer from The Rider - Joshua James Richards - to encapsulate the beauty of a seldom-seen America. Like the emotional peaks and valleys of the wanderer experience, vistas of sweeping magic-hour horizons convey both optimism and desolation. Wide shots and panoramas frame Fern as her story unfolds, with Ludovico Einaudi’s gentle yet evocative piano score underlying the imagery. Undoubtedly, there will be comparisons to the visual prowess of Terrence Malick or the earthiness of Kelly Reichardt, but Zhao bring her own sense of rhythm and focus to her captivating character study.
In the midst of COVID-19 and an increasingly volatile political landscape, it would be easy for Nomadland to descend into finger-wagging polemics, but the film never resorts to any kind of invective. There’s commentary here about how America’s capitalist system cruelly spits out its weakest and most vulnerable, but Zhao - refreshingly - lets her observer’s narrative speak for itself. In 2020, there’s nothing quite like the empathic lens of Nomadland, a film that traffics in the beauty of a restrained lyricism. There’s triumph, there’s tragedy, and there’s just the bittersweet state of migrant life; Chloé Zhao captures this in the most magnificent way possible. Perhaps Bob Wells most fully captures the spirit of nomad existence in his take on those who have departed, eschewing a final goodbye for the hopefulness of “See you down the road.”
