On Nomadland

I can’t write a criticism of Nomadland. If I’d studied film I might have the vocabulary for it. But I haven’t, and I have no desire to take this film apart, to see how it works. I just want to let it live with me.

Here goes.

Fern is widowed. Fern is poor. Fern is someone who the New York Times might term ‘forgotten’, if the New York Times was having a particular attack of conscience on a particular day. 

But that’s not really what Fern is, and it takes an entire movie to event start to understand what she really is. Fern is something to do with poverty, yes, and something to do with America, and what it means to be poor in America, and what it means to be free. And perhaps something to do with the possibility that the two are intimately related.

Fern lives in a van. Fern shits in a bucket. Fern works in any job that’ll have her.

Fern is a whole person, and who meets people who are whole, too. She is unafraid and wind-toughened, but at the core of her is something frightenable and soft.

Dave sees that. Dave might love Fern. But Fern is married, and the fact that her husband is dead doesn’t change that.

Fern makes friends, Swankie and Linda May. She doesn’t really have enemies, apart from flat tyres. She doesn’t romanticise things, apart from love, which was romantic to begin with. She loved her home, but it’s gone now.

She seems like someone who unconditionally accepts herself, and accepts her condition. She never rails. She never really seems angry. But she’s not passive, either. She just is, the way a cat or a wolf just is.

Fern is played by Frances McDormand, who won an Oscar, and she is directed by Chloé Zhao, who also won an Oscar. David Strathairn plays Dave, everyone else plays themselves. I feel that this is somehow intimately related to the idea of autofiction, but I’m not really interested in explaining how, except to echo the observation that sometimes fiction demands to be read as fact, and fact as fiction.