"Nomadland"

 By Matt Duncan

Coastal View News

How much do you need? A house? Running water and a toilet? A stable job? Health insurance? Restaurants, bars, friends, families, TV, and other entertainment? Most of us enjoy most of these things, but how much of it do we really need?

 

Nomads say: Not much. These nomads, which really do exist, roam the U.S. in their Ford- and Chevy-made ships of the desert. They eat what they can, work when they can, and sleep where they can—mostly in their vans.

 

Fern (Frances McDormand) is a nomad. She wasn’t always. She used to work with her husband in a U.S. Gypsum plan in Empire, Nevada. Then her husband died and the plant shut down (the whole town did, in fact). Everything crumbled. So, at the start of “Nomadland” (which just won Best Motion Picture at the Golden Globes and is streaming on Hulu), there is nothing tethering Fern to anything.

 

So she lets it all go. She sells a lot of her stuff, puts the rest in storage, buys a van, and heads out. She picks up temporary jobs here and there and radically simplifies her life.

 

Fern is quiet and reserved. She doesn’t exactly look happy—and you can tell her mind is elsewhere—but she insists she’s fine. She’s getting by. She’s making it. This isn’t the life she set out for herself, and boy does she sure miss her husband, but life on the road is now her life—the life she chose.

 

A bunch of others chose it too. A small army of nomads (several of whom are real-life nomads) come up around Fern, becoming her support, her community. The nomads are tough, but kind. They readily help each other out and revel in each other’s company, though they always end up saying goodbye.

 

The nomads have a different way of looking at things. Instead of asking how much we need, nomads—or anyone, really—might more helpfully ask how much we really want. A lot of people want as much as they can get, or more. But nomads embrace a different way of life. The austerity—or, rather, simplicity—of their lives does not always, or perhaps even usually, spring from a failure to acquire more and more stuff; it often springs from their belief that acquiring more and more stuff isn’t good—it isn’t healthy, it isn’t desirable, it’s not worth wanting. Stuff weighs you down. So does the owning of it.

 

Still, it’s not always easy to square the appeal of this message with the evident fact that, in many ways, nomads really do have it hard. Even aside from the strain of living off of odd jobs, eating out of a camper, and pooping in a bucket, life on the road takes its toll in many other ways. There may be something liberating about going where you want when you want, but it also looks to be pretty lonely and isolating.

 

Which is all to say that it’s complex. As is “Nomadland.” This movie consistently holds together contrasting moods—both positive and negative affect—in such organic, authentic, simple ways. It makes you feel bad for nomads, while also, in other ways, making you jealous of their courage and independence. The nomads are close to each other, despite constantly parting ways; their bond is, by its nature, evanescent—bound up in saying, “See you down the road.”

 

“Nomadland” is sad, but also beautiful. You see it on Fern’s face. There’s no hiding the hurt, the pain, the sorrow. Unlike the rest stops and short-term work, there’s no moving on from what she lost. It’s etched into the lines on her face. It’s a tired sadness—a weariness.

 

Yet there are also clear skies and sunsets, the open road and kinship. One way of looking at the nomads is as running away from something. Some are. But maybe for some it’s more like: keep moving, stay alive, one foot in front of the other.

 

That feeling is worth sitting with. Not trying to change it, or fix it, or move on—as if that were possible—but just recognizing the feeling. A lot of people feel it—the sadness mixed in with little glimmers of … what is it? Hope? Beauty? O.K.-ness? Whatever it is, “Nomadland” offers a meaningful glimpse. It’s not cheery. But it is good.