Nomadland

Cultural anthropologists believe that the ideal organization of humans as a species exists in tribes of 50 to 100 people.  That’s a manageable community.  Having to work at the local Amazon plant to pay for a $2,300 repair to a $5,000 van you live in is not.  The promise of civilization was that this wouldn’t be necessary.  As an Indian immigrant new to America, I wasn’t raised under the myth.  I was made no promises.  It’s easier to deal with reality when you aren’t sold a dream that doesn’t exist in the first place.

Where my earlier screening of PENGUIN BLOOM at the Toronto International Film Festival makes me less empathetic toward white people, NOMADLAND achieves the opposite.  The film, written, directed, and edited by Chloé Zhao, is at once enlightening and heartbreaking. An Elegy for American Exceptionalism: The nation built by frontiersmen always looked down on them. Rich White America lied to Poor White America all the while sneering at them.  We of Brown and Black America never assumed differently.  We always knew the masters couldn’t stand us.

As the title cards tell us, in 2011, the U.S. Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada, closed after 88 years of operation, due to shortfalls in demand for sheetrock (presumably the aftershocks of the housing collapse).  Fern (Frances McDormand), whose husband died shortly thereafter,  must now fend for herself, moving from job to job.  For a time, she works in an Amazon fulfillment center in the middle of nowhere.  She’s introduced to Carl, Angela, Doug, Ryan, Theresa, Candy, and other co-workers. One of them, explaining the story behind each tattoo on her arms, says, “Home isn’t just the work. It’s something you carry within you.”

Later, Fern wakes up in the fitness section of a discount store—something like a Wal-Mart.  A friend’s daughter asks, “My mom said you’re homeless, is that true?”

Fern replies, “I’m not homeless.  I’m just houseless.”

She lives in her van, getting by on the generosity and ingenuity of other nomads she befriends in RV parks.  Some talk about the tyranny of the dollar.  Some suffer from PTSD.  Others look up at the stars.

Zhao, the second of two women directors of color to make a powerful showing at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival, takes a freeform character study and gives it structure and style.  She abandons traditional two-shots so you can follow reactions and body languages of the person spoken to.  She gives us a long shot of McDormand just ambling through one RV park.  I remember places like this in my childhood, on the many summer road trips we made in our 1978 Dodge Aspen station wagon.  The sky-blue pink sunset, the cacti, and morning air so cool and crisp through your nostrils it gives you an endorphin kick.

Wanderlust is a strange thing.  If it’s natural, why does it so often attract the affluent?  But somehow in trying to escape our quotidian inanity we end up in equally affluent fauxdunk chic like Marfa, or, worse, commercial dumpster fires like Burning Man, Fyre Festival.  What about the Badlands of South Dakota or the redrock cliffs of Ghost Ranch in New Mexico which inspired Georgia O’Keeffe?  Who does road trips any more, when there are so many tourist traps you can book on Air BnB.  And that too arises from increasing gentrification and segregation of the haves and the have nots.

Mind you, in India, I’ve seen poverty the likes of which these folks in their run down vans can’t even imagine.  But that doesn’t make their situation less real.  It just frames it in a different context.

Based on the 2017 novel Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, the casting of three real nomads—Linda May, Charlene Swankie, and Bob Wells—cements the picture’s authenticity.  And it’s fascinating watching how Zhao’s editing seamlessly merges their ostensibly real stories with McDormand and Strathairn’s semi-scripted narrative.  Swankie’s cancer has spread to her brain, Bob’s son committed suicide at 28, Linda’s going to build a self-sufficient earthship.  Their stories of hardship and perseverance through the aftermath of the housing collapse reminded me of Ken Burns’ four-part, PBS miniseries, The Dust Bowl.

The common thread in NOMADLAND strikes a balance between dignity and pride.  Fern meets Dave (David Strathairn).   She likes him.  He brings her licorice to curb her smoking habit so she won’t have to drive at night looking for a convenience store to buy a pack of smokes.  But she’s got to keep moving because she refuses to be stuck in the past, yet finds herself still clinging to it, to her husband—her ring, old photograph albums conspicuously unoccupied by children, and to a van barely holding together.

And when that van finally breaks down, she’s quoted $2,300 for the repairs.  The vehicle’s worth $5,000.  She reaches out to her estranged sister for the money, which brings her face to face with the world she left behind after her husband’s death.  The taste of that stability entices. Is it enough to make her want to settle down with Dave?  Maybe that van breaking down is the best thing to happen to her.  Maybe the found family in Nomadland is.

As she makes her way to Wall, South Dakota, through a crevasse in the Badlands, she watches buffalo and bathes in the curling waters of a stream.  Now, if you don’t know the story about Wall, there’s a 76,000 square foot complex there called Wall Drug.  As you head east from Billings, Montana, or west from Rochester, Minnesota, you’ll start to encounter signs along that 650-mile stretch.  “150 miles to Wall Drug”… “30 miles to Wall Drug”… “You Just Missed Wall Drug”… it’s almost a crime if, at the very least, you don’t stop to take it all in.

NOMADLAND makes its world premiere at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival today.