Nomadland Is a Melancholy Story of Resilience and the American Work Ethic that Seeks Little Accountability

Thinking about the future keeps getting scarier. Even discounting the rise of fascism, imminent climate disaster and pervasive racial injustice, Americans are suffering to retain their humanity in the face of immense and long enduring economic precarity. While there remains a popular narrative of millennials and gen-z youth bearing the brunt of these distressing circumstances, boomers did not evade crisis as a monolith. Particularly following the 2008 housing crash and Great Recession, during which countless adults lost nest eggs, retirement savings and their own homes, the prospect of retirement has since become a frank impossibility for a large swath of the country.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is a mosaic of these Americans, many of whom have abandoned (or been forced out of) homeownership and have thus taken to the road in vans or RVs, traveling wherever honest work leads them. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by journalist Jessica Bruder, Zhao features many of Bruder’s real-life sources recounting personal stories of hardship while also preaching the benefits of their nomadic way of life. Despite the wealth of non-actors relaying intimate and striking tales of the death of the American dream and Zhao’s spectacular success of recounting real-life stories in narrative form with her previous films Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, the director stays closely tethered to Fern (Frances McDormand), who appears to be a composite character rendered from subjects in Bruder’s book.

Zhao’s contemplative look at this uncertain way of life is often despondent yet arresting—anecdotes surrounding suicide, sickness and astounding loss resonate profoundly, yet the marvelous backdrop of canyons, open deserts and purple-hued skies offer some form of consolation. These moments are most potent when conveyed by non-actors such as Linda May, who Bruder follows extensively in her book and Harper’s essay “The End of Retirement.” May also holds a special place in Zhao’s film, becoming one of the fictitious Fern’s closest friends and eventual shepherd into mobile living. While Zhao is clearly talented at involving non-actors in order to bolster the real human experiences explored in her work, the spell appears to be somewhat broken in Nomadland due to the predominant focus on McDormand’s character, making the non-actors ancillary as opposed to the focus of the story. Particularly during a scene where non-actor Swankie discloses her grim cancer prognosis to Fern, the real weight of Swankie’s ordeal seems incompatible even with McDormand’s clearly talented acting. For a film that aims to portray the plight of growing old in a country that offers little respite for aging populations aside from working themselves to death, Nomadland is less interested in confronting this issue as it is painting a beautiful picture of an unlikely way of life.