Movie Review: Nomadland

Chloe Zhao challenges stereotypes by capturing the humanity and desire for freedom of elderly American nomads.

by Jireh Deng

On YouTube, one can find hundreds of videos where millennials living the RV or van life proudly display how they live off the grid and on the road.

Chloe Zhao chooses instead to display another aspect of nomadic life behind the camera as she directed “Nomadland,” in which she received the title of first woman of color to have won a Golden Globe for directing.

The film itself is intimate and humble as it follows Fern, an elderly American, who is living in her van and grieving the death of her husband after being displaced when a US Gypsum plant closes in Empire, Nevada. We first see Fern grasping an heirloom plate at a storage unit with her belongings and then working a series of jobs including an Amazon warehouse, a restaurant, and camp host.

While the film is avoidant of political themes, the story and themes exist in a larger context of capitalism, and the unique struggles faced by those who don’t fall neatly into the category of “homeless.”

Many of her peers are older Americans who are unable to subsist off just social security benefits. The film itself is a closer look at a part of the American population that has been neglected and

forgotten at times: the members of the baby boomer generation that is not being caught by the created social safety nets.

When we are perhaps thinking of the urgency of youth synonymous with a desire to buck the system and be free, this is exactly what Fern and many of her elderly peers want for themselves. Swankie, another elderly nomad, is dying of cancer with only a few more months to live. Swankie wants to make a pilgrimage up to Alaska to make some final memories, refusing to spend the last of her days dying in a hospital.

Instead of relying on cliches of pitying the less fortunate, Zhao centers how these characters strive towards autonomy in a world of oftentimes limited and scarce choices.

Fern herself is offered two opportunities to settle down in a comfortable sedentary life with her sister and then with the affluent family of a fellow nomad, David. She ultimately turns down these living situations and we sense that Fern has a restless spirit in her.

Throughout the film, we see the large expanses of the wilderness of the desert and Fern’s attraction to the freedom of the road. In one scene, she rests naked, floating in a stream, and in another, she shouts her own name into the surrounding woods atop a rock.

Fern chooses this lifestyle for herself and perhaps the film’s strongest closing is when we see her return to seasonal work with Amazon again. She visits the former home she shared with her late husband and releases the items she held in storage before hitting the road once more. It’s a moment of release and freedom for Fern who has come to accept that this is the lifestyle she thrives in.

On the humble budget of $5 million, in comparison to the $200 million for Zhao’s next Marvel blockbuster film “The Eternals,” the simplicity of “Nomadland” rests so firmly in the realist imaginary that at times I remind myself over again this is a fictional film based off a journalistic non-fiction book and not a documentary.

Her prowess as director, writer and editor shows how her creative energy funneled a gentle touch in which her presence is so quiet, the audience is allowed to sit with the mundane and the struggles Fern and her comrades face in the daily in flat tires and improvising toilet plumbing.

Perhaps what lends the heightened sense of reality is how Zhao chose to weave real-life individuals on the road including Swankie, who is a real nomad who plays herself in the film.

I’m drawn to the authenticity of these characters in their peripatetic lifestyles. The story challenges the constraint of Generation Z’s perceptions of the baby boomer generation as popularized through catchphrases like “Ok boomer;” seeing older Americans as a stubborn sore spot in the new demographic and political shift in the country.

Zhao essentializes and captures the essence of the tenacity and adaptability of the human spirit of these elderly nomads in this tour de force film never shying away from the grittiness of reality.

Nomadland is now playing in theaters and streaming on Hulu.