Nomadland

Year of Release:  2020

Director:  Chloé Zhao

Screenplay:  Chloé Zhao, based on the book Nomadland:  Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Starring:  Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May, Charlene Swankie

Running Time:  107 minutes

Genre:  Drama

In 2011, recently widowed Fern (McDormand) loses her job when the US Gypsum plant she has worked for for year shuts down.  This devastates her hometown of Empire, Nevada, for which the plant was the principal employer.  Fern hits the road, living out of her van, travelling the highways and byways of the United States, taking casual work to make ends meet and becoming part of an extensive, supportive community of fellow nomads.

Written, produced, edited and directed by Chloé Zhao, and based on a non-fiction book by journalist Jessica Bruder, this is a powerful, beautiful and meditative film.  It captures the beauty, camaraderie and freedom of Fern's lifestyle while not ignoring the rootlessness, loneliness and hardship of her way of life.  Many of the cast are real nomads playing fictionalised versions of themselves.  It has a real documentary feel, even with established actors such as Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, you forget that they are actors and see them as real travellers.  It has a slow, languid place, and doesn't really have a story to speak of, it follows a year in Fern's life as she travels around and takes various jobs, such as packing boxes for Amazon, working in a fast food restaurant, and doing odd jobs at a campsite among other things.  The film is full of beautiful images and bleak images, sometimes both beautiful and bleak at the same time.  It's a vision of America that you don't really see often, particularly not in Hollywood films.  Frances McDormand has given many great performances throughout her career, but she has never been better than here.  The film could be accused of not going into some of the darker aspects of the nomad lifestyle, but this is a minor issue.  This is one of the best new films that I have seen in a long time, and it is definitely worth seeing at the cinema, if at all possible.

 Frances McDormand in Nomadland