Chloé Zhao's adaptation of Jessica Bruder's reportage book. Frances McDormand as a 60-something widow living out of her van across the American West. Best Picture 2020.
Empire, Nevada, 2011. The U.S. Gypsum mining operation closes; the company town is dismantled within months. Fern, a sixty-something woman widowed by her late husband's death from cancer, packs her belongings into a converted van and begins living mobile. The film follows her across roughly two years — working seasonal jobs (Amazon's CamperForce program, beet-harvesting, campground hosting), gathering with other older van-dwellers at desert meet-ups, encountering brief possibilities of conventional housing and choosing the road.
The film is loosely structured around Fern's encounters with other nomadic figures — most played by actual non-professional van-dwellers Zhao met during a year of pre-production research in their communities. Linda May, Swankie, Bob Wells all play versions of themselves. Fern's tentative friendship with another nomad, David (David Strathairn, the only other principal professional actor), provides the film's quietest dramatic line. The film closes on Fern returning to the abandoned Empire site one final time and driving back into the desert.
Chloé Zhao won Best Director at the 2021 Academy Awards — the second woman to win the prize after Kathryn Bigelow's 2010 victory for The Hurt Locker, and the first woman of colour to win in the category. Nomadland also won Best Picture and Best Actress (McDormand). The Best Picture win was significant: it was the second consecutive non-English-language-friendly Best Picture (after Parasite in 2020), and the first won by a non-American-born director since Roman Polanski's The Pianist in 2003.
What the win represented, structurally, was the continued expansion of the post-2016 Academy membership reform discussed in our Oscar essay. Zhao, a Chinese-born American director who had made three small independent features (Songs My Brothers Taught Me 2015, The Rider 2017, and Nomadland 2020), would not have been a plausible Best Director winner under the pre-2016 Academy. The expanded membership made the win possible.
Almost every credited supporting character in Nomadland is played by an actual van-dweller. Linda May, the elderly woman Fern meets early in the film, is a real Linda May whose journey across the rural-mobile communities Jessica Bruder documented in her source book. Swankie is a real Swankie; the deeply-moving sequence in which her character discusses her terminal cancer diagnosis was developed from her actual diagnosis. Bob Wells, the desert-meet-up organiser, is the real Bob Wells whose CheapRVliving YouTube channel and Rubber Tramp Rendezvous events are documented in the source book.
Zhao's structural choice to cast actual nomads alongside Frances McDormand produces a register of performance that conventional cinema does not always achieve. The non-professional performers are not, in the conventional sense, acting; they are inhabiting versions of their actual lives in scenes Zhao constructed around them. The technique requires McDormand to perform within their register rather than the other way around. The result is one of the most-distinctive American films of the post-pandemic period.
Nomadland has been argued about, since its release, for what it does and does not say about American economic precarity. The film depicts the working conditions of seasonal Amazon CamperForce employment, the structural reasons older Americans on fixed incomes can no longer afford conventional housing, the dismantling of single-employer company towns. The film does not, structurally, make these conditions its primary political subject. The protagonist Fern explicitly rejects the framing of herself as a victim of economic forces; she describes her life as a choice rather than a constraint.
Critics on one side argue this is the film's evasion — that the romantic-landscape framing softens what is, structurally, an economic horror story. Critics on the other side argue that the film honours Fern's interior framing rather than imposing the journalistic-political framing the source book uses. Both readings have textual support. The film is, in some sense, deliberately equivocal about what it is doing — and the equivocation is part of its argument.