Nomadland Review

It’s no secret that the American Dream is dying, if it’s not already dead. That may be a controversial statement, but it shouldn’t be. All you need to do is look at the numbers for wealth inequality, inflation, poverty, etc. Increasing numbers of people are waking up to the reality that the 9-5 work schedule is exploitative tyranny; that they are slaving away a third of theirs lives if not more in exhausting, meaningless work making money they’ll never even see. The illusion of freedom is just that; an illusion. You can choose where you work, what you do and potentially even when your hours are, but to walk away from this cycle means poverty and even death.

I could go on and on about the grim realities of the American economy and how this nation is no longer the meritocratic paradise of yore – if such a place ever existed – but that’s not really what this film is about. Sure, Nomadland acknowledges these realities to some extent, and even uses them as a foundation, but it’s as much about the grim reality of the American Dream as a bucket list is about death. Nomadland takes it for granted that in the land of the free, most people are anything but, and rather than expound upon this it instead decides to paint an entirely different picture of freedom – and delivers one of the finest films of the past year in the process.

Nomadland isn’t really a story so much as it is a scrapbook of Americana. It has a protagonist – the often somber yet delightfully anarchic Fern, played wonderfully by Francis McDormand – and she has somewhat of a loose arc throughout the story of letting go of her past and of the constraints that hold her down, but Nomadland is, first and foremost, a story about freedom and America – not as we know it, but as the Nomads know it. The Nomads live on the roads, staying in their vans as they drift from place to place, often older people who have lost everything and are unable to survive on their retirement benefits. They’ve spent their whole life living by the book, working a steady job and saving up for the end of their life, doing everything they were supposed to do, yet when push came to shove none of it mattered, and they were cast out on their feet with nothing but a van to call home. But if Nomadland has anything to say at all, it’s that the words “home” and “house” are not synonyms, and that freedom isn’t money or a career but people and the roads that connect them.

It may often stray into heavy subject matter, but so does life. For every somber moment, there’s something beautiful here. Director Chloe Zhao has captured some incredible images of both nature and people, and weaves them together to form a collage of all of the different people and places Fern meets throughout her journey. The film jumps from place to place and person to person with an almost casual ease, trading in rigid structure for the carefree weightlessness of the Nomad lifestyle. I’ve never really been interested in Americana, but this film is the one that really sold me on it, because true Americana isn’t a government or a misguided sense of patriotism but instead the vast and diverse collection of people that live in this country, and the variety of stories that they are capable of telling. Most people you meet in your life you probably won’t see again, and acquaintances come and go, but they leave something in everyone they meet, including you. Everywhere you go, everything you do, and everyone you meet leaves something inside of you, and while the objects you surround yourself with may break, and the people may drift away and the memories fade, there is something inside of you that will never truly die no matter how far you go.

In some ways, you might consider the Nomad lifestyle to be the true American dream. At least one character points out that America has always been founded on the ideas of adventure and discovery (and also unfortunate genocides accompanying those things, but that’s not particularly relevant here). Perhaps the white picket fence and 9-5 career isn’t the American Dream, but instead only a trap designed to pull away from the true Dream. In the supposed freest country on Earth, it may be only the Nomads who are truly free.

I could go in depth about some of the flaws that Nomadland has – it’s a little bit too long, it seems to have a soft spot for Amazon warehouses that left a bad taste in my mouth, and for a movie that’s so much about the people that make up the American countryside it’s not very diverse – but overall I really just don’t want to. Nomadland is a very special film, and it’s likely to be showered with Academy Award nominations this month and deservedly so.

It goes without saying that the lifestyle portrayed in Nomadland is probably not for everyone, but I think that there are increasingly fewer people who don’t feel like they’re trapped by their life somehow, stuck in a menial office job or imprisoned by debts and legality and all the other tricks that the system uses to get you down. The nomads have found a form of escape from this, and while there may be other methods, there’s something uniquely seductive about the endless road that they live on. For me, I can still hear it calling to me ever since I left this film’s world. Maybe it will call to you too.