In year where all theaters were shuttered, Nomadland won big at the Oscars. Earned best picture at a 93rd Academy Awards defined by the pandemic, as movies that premiered on streaming services ruled the ceremony.
Frances McDormand also won for the film, three years after her Oscar for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Anthony Hopkins, meanwhile, was named best actor for his role as a dementia-ridden man in “The Father,” eclipsing the emotional moment that would have come had Chadwick Boseman been only the third actor to receive posthumous honors for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
“People wish to be settled,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” This tension between stability and uprooting, between the illusory consolations of home and the risky lure of the open road, lies at the heart of “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s expansive and intimate third feature.
Based on Jessica Bruder’s lively, thoroughly reported book of the same name, “Nomadland” stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a fictional former resident of a formerly real place. The movie begins with the end of Empire, Nev., a company town that officially went out of existence in late 2010, after the local gypsum mine and the Sheetrock factory shut down. Fern, a widow, takes to the highway in a white van that she christens with the name Vanguard and customizes with a sleeping alcove, a cooking area and a storage space for the few keepsakes from her previous life. Fern and Vanguard join a rolling, dispersed tribe — a subculture and a literal movement of itinerant Americans and their vehicles, an unsettled nation within the boundaries of the U.S.A.
Bruder’s book, unfolding in the wake of the Great Recession, emphasizes the economic upheaval and social dislocation that drive people like Fern — middle-aged and older; middle-class, more or less — out onto the road. Reeling from unemployment, broken marriages, lost pensions and collapsing home values, they work long hours in Amazon warehouses during the winter holidays and poorly paid stints at national parks in the summer months. They are footloose but also desperate, squeezed by rising inequality and a frayed safety net.
You can watch the trailer of the movie in the player below:
