![]() At a sporting-goods store, she runs into a family she knows. They had no children, and now it’s just her and Vanguard. Fern was married to a guy named Bo, but he, too, passed away. As we’re told at the outset of the film, 2011 marked the end of Empire the plant was shut, and the town effectively died. Fern used to live and to labor in Empire, Nevada, an old-school company town, owned by United States Gypsum. ![]() Only someone as rooted and as resilient as McDormand, perhaps, can play so rootless a character. I tried to imagine another actress in the role, but soon gave up. At the other extreme, she gets to float naked in a creek, gazing up at the sky, with arms flung wide: a tranquil sight, though it doesn’t look especially healing or transcendent. Later, an upset stomach forces her to excrete noisily into a bucket. (If McDormand receives an Oscar nomination for her pains, as she should, expect her to show up in Crocs.) One of the first actions that she is required to perform onscreen is to pee outside, in the middle of nowhere, on a freezing day. She is a fictional creation, and she’s played by a bona-fide film star, albeit one with a hilariously low dose of airs and graces. But what’s so dramatic about it? Why is it not a documentary? It was Bruder who came across Linda, Swankie, and other nomads, and reported in detail on the pattern of their endurance now they have migrated into Zhao’s movie and brought their weatherings with them. in search of temporary jobs, some of which come with a place to park, plus access to power and water. According to the jargon, you can be a vandweller or, more specifically, a workamper, which means that you travel around in your R.V. Most of them are of riper years, weathered by a steady-humored stoicism, and they’ve shrugged off the burden of property ownership in favor of what’s known as wheel estate. They may have been scathed by personal hardship, or spit out by the financial collapse of 2008. That is nonfiction, through and through: a deep delve, patiently researched, into the rising number of Americans for whom a stable existence is unaffordable. “Nomadland,” which won the main prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is based on the 2017 book of the same name, by Jessica Bruder. Thus, Linda, a smiling and capable figure with silver hair, is played by Linda May Swankie, who has seven or eight months to live, and who hangs a skull and crossbones on the side of her van, is played by Swankie and so on. In the same vein, most of the folks in “Nomadland” are, as it were, true to themselves-genuine wanderers, recounting their experience as birds of passage, and radiating a singular blend of stringency and warmth. His sister, Lilly, who has Asperger’s, plays a version of herself. Brady, for instance, is played by a real-life rider, also named Brady, from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, and his wound is no invention. She calls it Vanguard.Īnother takeaway from Zhao’s work: no land is more fertile than the border zone between documentary and fiction. Well, she does have a home, but it’s a white van that she has adapted, with lots of storage space, to be her only dwelling. And now, at the start of “Nomadland,” which Zhao wrote and directed, we meet Fern ( Frances McDormand), who no longer has a husband, a regular job, or a home. As “ The Rider” (2018) gets under way, the hero-a young fellow named Brady-already has an angry gash in his head, having tumbled from his horse at a rodeo and taken a hoof to the skull. One of the things we learn from the films of Chloé Zhao is this: bad luck is the stuff that happens before a story begins.
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