Chloé Zhao’s ‘Nomadland’ Is As Vast As The American Landscape It Travels [Venice Review]

In almost no way does Chloé Zhao‘s quiet, enormous, deep breath of a movie, “Nomadland,” resemble “Blade Runner.” Except there’s this one moment: an outstanding speech in a film as attuned to vast wild silences as to conversation. Fern (Frances McDormand) is talking to her friend and fellow nomad Swankie (played, like many of the other roles by the real person on whom she is based). In a calm, accidental-seeming close-up, Swankie delivers a brimming monologue reminiscent of Rutger Hauer’s famous closing speech, but instead of C-beams glittering near the Tannhauser Gate, it’s a family of moose in Idaho and a cliff speckled with swallows nests, whose whirling occupants are reflected in the lake beneath her canoe, suspending her in the middle of the flock. And instead of sorrowful rage that these tears in rain will at some point be lost forever, Swankie recites her litany with awe and gratitude: It is a thanksgiving. To regard all the things you’ve seen and felt and thought as worth the high cost of experiencing them is the gentle nudge of “Nomadland” – a wise, beautiful film summoned up entirely from things authentically seen, felt, and thought.

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Fern is a 61-year-old widow, who has been recently orphaned from the gypsum-mining town she called home for most of her adult life. Empire, Nevada not only died following the mine’s closure, it’s been all but erased, its zip code canceled – a detail somehow more poignant given that the first of many seasonal jobs Fern takes up is her regular Christmas gig among the bar codes and zip codes of an Amazon packing warehouse.

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At Amazon, Fern, who has been living out of a van tricked out as a shabby but functional RV, meets Linda May, an old hand at the nomadic lifestyle. (Linda is like Swankie, one of the people interviewed in Jessica Bruder’s book, on which the film is based). When the season ends, Linda tells her about an annual gathering in Quartzite, Arizona run by self-sufficient RV lifestyle philosopher-guru Bob Wells.

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At that meeting, its dimensions laid out in one extraordinary long tracking shot, Fern begins the learn the ropes of this restless way of life and forms new bonds, with Wells himself and the aforementioned Swankie, and with Dave (a perfectly modulated David Strathairn) whose tentative but unmistakable romantic interest in Fern gives the roving, roaming “Nomadland” a very loose narrative arc. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes alone, Fern will take jobs at campsites and novelty village cafeterias, and over the course of crisscrossing the American West and Midwest, from Nebraska to Nevada to Northern California, she will visit Dave’s family and her own sister (Melissa Smith). But just as meaningfully, she will often be alone or among strangers in those wide, wide landscapes, learning that though their beauty is free, there is a price to be paid for having the freedom of them, in the currency of loneliness. Fern, resourceful not just in practical ways but with unexpected reserves of Shakespearean poetry and handicraft talent to keep her occupied, is willing to pay it. 

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McDormand is a joy. Her unmade-up, no-vanity appearance quietly redefines what a cinematic face is supposed to look like, even as she gives Fern her sudden, lopsided smile, and her loopy sense of humor – arranging a “spa day” at the campsite or shrieking in alarm and amusement on a trip to the reptile house at the zoo. It’s hard to imagine any other movie star whose presence would not compromise the purity of Zhao’s approach, but McDormand does not just give herself to her role, she donates herself to the film’s wider project, which is the illumination of a way of life and state of mind far beyond the reaches of any one performance to encompass. As great as she is, she operates here as a kind of willing Trojan Horse, providing people who would not ordinarily do so with a reason to go and see “Nomadland,” a film with an almost docu-fictional, journalistic interest in this willfully self-marginalized community, that stars the enticing landscapes of Joshua James Richards‘ superlative photography, the voices, faces, and passions of the real-life nomads… and also Frances McDormand, in roughly that order. 

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This is not a sentimental movie, but the people it observes with such clear eyes sometimes are, the way they’re also sometimes hard, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and often desperately, strangely sweet. The only thing they never are, in “Nomadland,” is cruel, as though there’s a tacit understanding throughout this whole far-spread community, connected to each other mainly by their lack of connection to everyone else, that life has probably been cruel enough already if you find yourself here. The nomadic lifestyle exerts an alluring pull, but most who choose it also felt a push from some sadness or tragedy or failure in their past, settled lives.

In Zhao’s steady, unwavering curiosity and intelligence (consolidating and extending qualities already on display in her wonderful “The Rider“), McDormand’s perfect synthesis with her role, Richards’ simple and stunning image-making, and Ludovico Einaudi‘s lovely, light-and-shade piano melodies (the film is scored to extracts from his album “Seven Days Walking” and it’s the only time I can remember a music credit getting a separate round of applause at a press screening), “Nomadland,” like Fern, carries in its nomad heart all it needs. And so it moves lightly from place to place, never dawdling too long, never neglecting the journey for the destination, and finding in every departure a new homecoming. 

For the viewer, this lightness and far-sightedness is an ever-expanding gift. It makes you look at the sky a little differently afterward and feel connected to the vast open spaces out there in the world, but also to the plains and hills and valleys inside yourself, the internal roads and deserts that suddenly seem, after “Nomadland” to extend impossibly far in every windy direction, so far that it can be summer in your heart and winter in your belly, and, like the light from Vega, the light from one fingertip might take a whole lifetime to reach the other outstretched hand. Even if your time is running out, that view never will, it will continually unfold out from itself, multiplying the acreage within: “Nomadland” is a gorgeous, endless unfurling. [A-]

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