Loving America has not been easy in recent years. Joe Biden has been making life a little easier for a few months, but some scars that were hit in the Trump years only heal slowly. Perhaps that is why it takes the gaze of a woman who does not take America for granted to recapture the magic that still emanates from this country. Chloé Zhao, who won the director’s Oscar in spring for her film masterpiece “Nomadland” (as well as the award for the best film), was born in Beijing in 1982, went to school in England as a teenager and later moved to the USA. The woman in her late thirties has kept her dream of the USA as a land of unlimited freedom, but is also vigilant enough to expose its darker side.
Frances McDormand, who won her third Academy Award for Best Actress for this role, plays Fern, a woman who wanders the United States as a modern nomad. However, she did not leave her home in Nevada voluntarily. First her husband died, then the plasterworks, which had given the place prosperity and both jobs for years, closed. The authorities want to send her into early retirement, but Fern wants to work. So she sells almost all of her belongings, buys a small van and converts it into a caravan that will become her home from now on. “I’m not homeless. I’m just homeless,” she once says, even if she has to do her business in a bucket. “It’s not the same.”
“Nomadland” lives from the encounters
Even in the USA, however, there is limitless freedom only in exchange for hard work. Fern works in an Amazon warehouse to help out in the Christmas business, toils in a sugar beet field and in a restaurant. But above all, she lets herself drift all over the country. “Nomadland” lives from the encounters that Fern makes. It is mostly amateur actors that Frances McDormand meets. For example Bob Wells, who is actually something like a nomad on four wheels. Chloé Zhao’s film breaks the boundaries between staging and pure observation. Zhao, who also wrote the script, looks through the distance at the country and its people, openly and without prejudice. And when the camera keeps catching a sunset or sunrise between all the encounters, it’s never cheesy, but honest and beautiful.
Nomadism, wandering around only with what you can carry with you or drive around with you, be it in a van or once in a covered wagon, is becoming the very DNA of the United States in “nomad land”. The film – which seems timeless, but is set in 2011 – celebrates a sense of community among motorized nomads that may never have existed, but a little idealism is part of dreaming. “Nomadland” has no real storyline, but simply follows Fern tirelessly through the country in her caravan, and what doesn’t sound like much is an incredible amount here.
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