The Sound and the Fury: Missed Opportunities in Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland

Glory Days

Image by Bart Ryker

Mussolini once said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” which, as far as thumbnail sketches of totalitarianism go, is pretty good copy. The intrusion of politics into every facet of everyday life, into the most private spheres an individual can inhabit: that is the stuff of which dystopias are made. With that in mind, then, I hope you will forgive me for what is to follow; I’m aware of the risks, but I’m going out on this limb anyway. Mea culpa.

The trouble with Nomadland isn’t its politics: the trouble is it isn’t political enough.

For those of you who missed it, Chloe Zhao’s film Nomadland won the Best Picture Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards, and with good reason: gorgeously filmed and anchored by a powerhouse performance (Best Actress winner Frances McDormand took home a trophy as well for her role as Fern), the film had Best Picture buzz attached to it from the moment the Tomatometer started aggregating. Based on the best selling book by Jessica Bruder, the film arrived like a timely exploration of life in post-Great Recession America. The episodic narrative follows a woman in her sixties who, following the losses of her husband, house, and job, embarks upon a nomadic existence in the American West, living in her van and working odd jobs to make ends meet.

Despite arriving with a kinda-sorta ripped-from-the-headlines vibe, the film ultimately winds up pulling far more punches than it lands. An early monologue by Bob Wells, the film’s van-life guru, vents some eff-the-man anti-capitalist spleen in one scene; another delightfully cringey moment features Fern skewering a couple of her sister’s clueless liberal acquaintances, who wax romantic about “chucking it all’ to live on the road like her. Beyond that, though, the film takes a strangely apolitical tack for such politically charged subjects. The intention may have been to capture something timeless, but the result winds up being oddly toothless.

For starters, let’s talk about Amazon. Fern bookends the film with stints as seasonal help at one of Amazon’s totally-not-ironically named fulfillment centers. The Jungle this ain’t, though; there will be no scenes of drivers desperately pissing in soda bottles, no undocumented workers being run over by forklifts. I’ve worked in distribution centers like these; it’s not overstating the case to say that what you will find in many of these places are exactly the types of exploitative, corrupt, and violent hierarchical human behaviors that made the labor movement a thing in the first place. What Nomadland presents us with instead is far sunnier; employees smiling through a safety meeting, bonding over a coworker’s tattooed Morrissey lyrics. There is a sense of melancholy in these scenes, to be sure, as the basic human need for connection to others takes root even amongst transient workers at one of the world’s largest corporations. Left on the editing room floor is any indication of Amazon’s culpability in so thoroughly deforming the American economy that having senior citizens sleep in their vans on company property in exchange for guaranteeing two-day shipping for rich people’s trinkets seems like a reasonable way to run a civilization. Who needs a bowling league when you’ve got Amazon?

Amazon is low-hanging fruit, though; the real missed opportunity is Fern herself. I’ll lay my cards on the table here: it seems extraordinarily likely to me that Fern would’ve been inclined to vote for the Orange God King. You might find that to be insensitive stereotyping on my part, but consider: non-college educated white women in Nevada broke for Trump in 2016 53% to 42%. Think pieces about the white working class’s abandonment of the Democratic Party sprouted like weeds after the 2016 election. Fern worked at a gypsum plant in the desert next to her husband for years until the plant closed down and took her whole community with it- whether she would’ve been receptive to it or not, she is exactly the target audience for Trump’s flavor of right-wing populist nationalism. And while it’s been my own experience that nomad groups like the ones depicted in the film are far from homogenous, it again seems likely to me that fringy libertarian types would be over-represented in those particular populations.

Set aside for the moment the argument about what Fern would’ve been, though, and consider what she could’ve been. Like so much postmodern art, the film has a squishy relationship with verisimilitude; the characters are both real and fictional (several of the film’s roles are “played” by real life nomads “acting” under their own names); Fern herself is a fictional person dropped into a film based on a non-fiction book¹. Fern is ultimately Chloe Zhao’s creation; it wouldn’t have been a heavy imaginative lift to have given her more of a red-state attitude. It’s certainly easy to find multiple layers in McDormand’s performance; the camera lingers on her face throughout the film, and we watch as Fern cycles through grief, loneliness, stoicism, rebellion, and resignation. It’s likely you’ve encountered people like her; I count people like her amongst my closest friends, my dearest family. But I also recognize the inherent conservatism of people like Fern. Having lost so much- her husband, her job, her home- Fern knows what happens when one isn’t able to conserve the things that are most meaningful. I also know what my more progressive friends would tend to think of these values: that they are restrictive, oppressive, small-minded, provincial. Imagine what a gift it would’ve been for pandemic-isolated liberals to have been asked to commiserate with someone so different from themselves, at a once-in-a-lifetime historical moment where we were all hungrier than perhaps we’d ever been for some kind of human connection.

Ultimately, what we are left with is a film that is more of a sketch than a three-dimensional drawing, focusing on a character who is too enigmatic, too much of a cypher, to ever seem like a flesh-and-blood human. Which brings us to the film’s final cop-out: its pandering to blue-state progressivism’s obsession with trauma and grief. By focusing so much on the tragic personal events that led Fern and her fellow nomads to life on the road, the film smooths over so many rough edges as to become almost shapeless. Zhao seems incapable of presenting us with any motivating events for nomadhood beyond grief and loss- Fern’s grief over her husband, Bob’s loss of his son to suicide- as though an interesting character motivated by loss of faith in government, compounded by the collapse of his or her community, with a don’t-tread-on-me attitude and the red-state snark to back it up, wouldn’t have been sufficiently sympathetic to the film’s intended audience. Perhaps this was a wise move; the film version of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy dared to ask us to sympathize with conservative characters and conservative values, and despite being a rather humdrum 3&1/2 star paint-by-numbers Ron Howard film, it was absolutely brutalized by film critics from coast to coast.

None of this is to say that Nomadland isn’t a fine and well crafted film. It is both those things. But I can’t help but imagine the film it could’ve been, the film perhaps that we needed it to be. There is an opening in our culture right now for art that can bridge the gulfs that we have erected between each other. Nomadland had an opportunity to do just that. It’s vision, however, is too singular, it’s frame too narrow. Content with merely scraping the surface of a small subculture, it misses the opportunity to hold a mirror up to ourselves, to show us a bit more about who we are actually sharing this enormous country with².

The awards season is now behind us, and for such a quiet and contemplative film, there was a lot of sound and fury surrounding it. It’s a shame to think it may all wind up signifying nothing.

¹This is the part where I confess to not having read the book.

²I can also imagine another film in which a disgruntled corporate human-
resources administrator leaves the trappings of her safe blue-state environment to reconnect with the noble folkways of her red-state brethren. Let’s all agree that no one wants to watch that movie.