Nomadland
Chloe Zhao's Nomadland takes in the breadth of the yawning world around us. It walks its empty places and lingers quietly, gleaning the lives and moments mostly overlooked by our society. The film follows a year in the life of Fern, played by Frances McDormand, as she travels the west living out of her van and taking temporary jobs through the changing seasons bringing her back where she started. It is a year full of the places she sees and people she meets in her journey. Up front, this movie moved me deeply, so there's a level of personal resonance that comes into play as we unpack it.
Zhao's desire to reconnect with life is evident from the start. Fern's journeys and Zhao's film are peopled with strangers and nomads and the brief windows we get into their lives as they deal with death and life, time and eternity, joy and tears, companionship and loneliness, music and silence, fullness and emptiness. And this is just where Fern finds herself. In between the life she had but is lost, and wandering the life now before her.
Zhao is patient in drawing out her themes as she spends time with these nomads with the sole interest it seems of bearing witness to them and listening to their words. Their voices and faces play in concert with the wide open spaces they congregate in and seek out. Her camera pans the length of a fallen redwood, and frames the bare desert, filling the images with the poetry of Shakespeare and the film's meditative score. It ties the fleeting nature of our lives to its lasting beauty. Nature reflects our hearts back to us. And that is where Zhao seeks to go. Her film hurts, because to truly love something is to eventually grieve it. Her film yearns because loss cannot be mended only, remembered, felt and endured with nothing for a substitute. And her film transcends, because for all that, there is peace in no longer needing to find that substitute for what is lost. She takes us with Fern as she lives simply beneath the humbling mountains, and by the quieting roar and foam of the seas, walking the carved rock, her nights illuminated by ancient star light.
Fern works wherever she can find work, living out of her van, and taking life's terms as her own. There is a strong thread of independence in the film as the nomads reject "the tyranny of the dollar." They are a group of people no longer allowing what has been to dictate what will be. Fern advises a friend who laments being a poor father "to be a good grandfather." She confesses to another nomad she has "spent too much of my life remembering." She is living intentionally as she sees fit. It's an honesty mirrored by Zhao as she takes the time to show the cost others pay who care for Fern as they watch her go.
To find others to share these sights and lifestyle with is to find a family. I think in this fact lies the true wonder and brilliance of Zhao's work. We need one another, but in the end we are all of us nomads, driving our vans through this life and if we're lucky, finding others with which to share it. We can help carry one another's burdens or abandon one another to them. This group chooses to bear the burdens. They make the going easier by taking the time to listen to each other's stories and being present in the pain. And it is good. We hear a taste of that goodness in an estranged father playing the piano with his son, late at night, for the first time in a long time. We hear it in the crooning song of a forgotten man who sings of those who departed but he has not forgotten. We see it in the broken hearted smile of a grieving father who cannot understand how to live on an earth that his son no longer walks. We feel it in the hugs of goodbyes helplessly infused with the ingrained human hope, even in the face of death, that we will somehow see one another down the road again. And take up again this love of old, the longing still there to keep going, Fern's life is impermanent because no one place, thing, or person fulfills it. There is something unrequited in that lifestyle which speaks to what it means to be honestly human.
Zhao does not look for answers, but rather her documentary style of filmmaking goes in search of a people who have found another way of life. So the question becomes where do we go when the factories go quiet, and the homes are hollowed? When the towns are boarded to be left, and we find ourselves cold or hungry or alone? This question hangs over the film from first frame to last. And Nomadland offers an answer of sorts, but only for a time. In the end, we are all nomads making our way alone. It's in recognizing this that Zhao uncovers and sketches out a particular and beautiful portrait of the human spirit.
- RyGuy