Nomadland Review: Houseless but adventurous, realistic and full of heart

Nomadland

Nomadland
A: Drama
Dir: Chloe Zhao
Cast: Frances McDormand, Douglas G Soul, Ryan Aquino
Rating: 4

A wonderful depiction of great loss, fortitude, sense of adventure and compassion during the Great Recession, this film comes at a time when the world is hurtling towards another recession - given the incessant ebbs and flows of the current COVID-19 pandemic. The cynosure of all critical eyes at this year's much delayed awards season, Chloe Zhao's intimately rendered tale of a woman in her 60s embarking on a journey through the Western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession is visually stunning, conveying strong emotion through a vividly empathetic canvas.

Written for the screen by Chloe Zhao, based on a book by Jessica Bruder, the filmed journey comes alive with the sense of adventure, perseverance, resilience and spirit of individual freedom that permeates every scene. This is a story of survival against odds and on one's own terms. Fern (Frances McDormand) lives as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad. When the gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada closed, the town of Empire quite literally collapsed. In six months, its entire zip code was eliminated. Fern, grieving a life that's been ripped away from her, must survive on seasonal work due to her choice to live on the open roads of the American West. She may be unshackled from conventionalism and conformism by the loss of her job and the death of her husband, but there's a price she is paying for choosing to be houseless.

Replete with poetic dialogue and soliloquies between Fern and her fellow nomads, against the backdrop of vast landscape shots and natural sounds, the narrative captures the unique way of life as much as it highlights the challenges and the real life nomads that populate it.

The movie is as much a triumph of spirit (characters) as it is of hard work (by the director and lead actor). McDormand literally lives her role, experiencing the triumphs and tribulations of a real nomad all through the filming that also included real-life nomads as significant characters in the film. Zhao's simple yet brilliant evocation of an emotionally distanced life of choice owes as much to McDormand's subsuming of her own true self as it does to Zhao's own unique storytelling technique. This is aching, true-blue realism at its finest.