Fern, the 61-year-old widow in Nomadland (played by Frances McDormand), stayed inside a van and worked at an Amazon Warehouse in Nevada. It was Christmas and she was shopping at a sporting goods store when she saw familiar faces around which made her take a trip down the memory lane to a time when she lived in Empire, a company-owned mining town. Thanks to the Great Recession, the town was abandoned as a casualty and just before they parted ways, a girl Fern mentored asked her if she homeless as the girl’s mother had said. Fern simply said that she was ‘houseless’ and that it was not the same thing.
Written and directed by Chloe Zhao, Nomadland hit the theatres on February 19. The movie is based on the book, also called Nomadland, written by Jessica Bruder. Jessica spent years researching the lives of nomads through the country and beautifully expressed a rather invisible, but predominant portion of what constitutes the American workforce. She lived in a second-hand van named ‘Halen’ to understand the subjects, like Swankie and Linda May, better who also played their respective parts in the movie. For avid readers, the non-fiction book, released in 2017, gives a complete account of what is meant by post-recession contemporary nomads.
Fern, a fictional character, enlivened it. The film has loosely unfolded the narrative through Fern and her navigation of the ‘life on the road’. She kept doing multiple jobs and befriended fellow nomads as she adjusted to the new normal. Had it not been for Frances, as Jessica told Time Magazine, it would have been impossible to experience the true essence of the nomad lifestyle. She’s truly the backbone and everything else of the story.
Chloe is known for bringing life into his previous films like The Rider, and My Brothers Taught Me, where he had cast non-professional actors. In this film, he had chosen real-life nomads to play the same roles and that brought true magic into it. While he was adapting the book onscreen, Chloe said that only the real-life elements could have shaped the story authentically.
Ever since the film became the first to grab top prizes from Toronto and Venice film festivals, it has created quite a buzz among film buffs. Even recently, it gained four Golden Globe nominations, including the Best Motion Picture (Drama) and the Best Director.
Jessica had spoken at length to Time Magazine in regards to her book that largely dealt with the art of survival. Jessica had written a cover story, The End of Retirement, covering the lives of old and retired people working temporary jobs, for Harper’s Magazine in 2014. After 3 years, she published Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. Mostly centered on the 64-year-old grandmother, Linda May, who lived inside her second-hand jeep and kept herself busy working low-wage jobs, only to save enough money for her dream of building a sustainable ‘Earthship’ home. Jessica was mesmerized by Linda’s unselfconsciousness which inspired her to write the book. She was so natural in all her activities, including randomly chatting with people or even talking to Jessica, that documenting her was nothing less than a pleasure!
When Jessica accompanied Linda, she could almost feel the aftermath of the recession for middle-class Americans who were forced into vans and RVs for a permanent address. She interviewed people who worked in sugar beet harvesting plants and recounted the physical labor that took a toll on their health. The words, the stories, and the experiences were all real and led the book to receive a place on several best-of-the-year lists after being published by W.W. Norton. The book very carefully dissected both the American dream and the divide in the middle-class sections. So much so that a New York Times review called it ‘brilliant and haunting’, while Timothy R. Smith, a musical artist, said it was ‘devastating and revelatory’.
The credit goes to Chloe for the overall film adaptation. Keeping Linda, Swankie, and Bob Wells was truly a great decision as it brought the reality of the characters into the fictionalized work in its truest sense. No wonder it won the Best Picture, Best Director, and the Best Actress awards at the 93rd Academy Awards.