Nomadland

Directed by Chloé Zhao

Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Frances McDormand in Nomadland

To some, it might feel odd to describe Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland as an essential big-screen experience: it’s a low-budget film of fragile intimacy, as fixated on the planes and paths of Frances McDormand’s face as it is on landscape-based spectacle. Yet it cries out for the cinema’s immersive breadth and pull. Zhao has fashioned a spacious, restless American road movie that at once feels indebted to just about every landmark in that essential genre — from The Grapes of Wrath to Easy Rider — while forging its own route, determined by 21st-century economics, and the inquisitive modernity of Zhao's signature docufiction technique.

The result is a moving, movable Rorschach of a road movie, in which your view of its protagonist's independent journey may be tilted by your own circumstances and desires. Fern (McDormand, never more ornery or magnificent) is a sixtysomething widow who, since being laid off, has untethered herself from the industrial Nevada town where she and her husband built a quiet, sturdy life. Shedding most of her material belongings, she has made her battered white van her home, buffeted across America by seasonal employment, personal connections and her own whims.

In a sense it sounds romantic, and for every acquaintance who frets about her comfort and safety, there's another to put a rosy lens on it. “It's not that different from what the pioneers did,” Fern's comfy, suburban-planted sister observes. Whether her tone is laced with condescension or wistful envy is an ambiguity that Nomadland — which doesn't put a gloss on Fern's stoic, still-grieving loneliness, nor the grim reality of on-the-road bowel movements — isn't at pains to resolve.

Zhao doesn't shy from beauty, either. The Chinese director’s outsider vision of America's uneasy, unspoken-for middle indulges in the spectacle of spookily sweeping Death Valley vistas and blazing lilac-fire sunsets — exquisitely light-painted by her cinematographer and partner Joshua James Richards — while her script risks sentimentality as it advances the elemental, nature-based rewards of an unmoored life. But this isn't a recruitment drive, and Nomadland is suitably wrinkled and complicated by the varied outlook of the real-life nomads Zhao has cast as McDormand's co-stars, ranging from shrugging endurance to hopeful spiritualism. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” wrote Kris Kristofferson — Zhao's alternately pragmatic and feeling-flooded film proves the truth of that lyric, but lets us decide how much there is to win.

NOMADLAND (2020) Written by Chloé Zhao | Based on the book by Jessica Bruder | Shot by Joshua James Richards | Edited by Chloé Zhao

Available to watch in cinemas across the UK and on Disney+