4.5 stars out of 5
IMAX on Sunday, or my laptop on Friday? God help me, I love that big screen. And thus warranted my first trip of the pandemic to Paramus. Not quite a nomad, but, it’s a start.
I’d heard positive buzz about this movie for months now, and was wondering when I’d get a chance to see it. I know nothing about director/screenwriter Chloé Zhao, but I do trust Frances McDormand’s choices. (Well, except for that Three Billboards garbage.) The film is based in a reality that perhaps you know more about than I do: There are many people, in RVs and smaller, traversing this occasionally great land, living in their vehicles.
For the most part, I’m not talking about your mom and dad selling the condo, buying a luxury RV, and heading off to “see the country.” The people highlighted here represent a population that usually can’t afford traditional housing. They seek seasonal labor and migrate away from the harshest weather. It ain’t the glamorous life, Sheila E. But there’s something beautiful and deeply, deeply satisfying about it too.
McDormand plays Fern. She’s widowed and her town—Empire, Nevada—has gone belly-up (just as it did in real life when the gypsum company folded). Holiday work at Amazon helps her get by. But when that dries up and it starts to get really cold, she decides to give the nomad life a try.
Pretty much everybody in this movie plays themselves. And as Fern hears their stories, the early going has a bit of a documentary feel. But Zhao has a superb visual sense, and hot damn is McDormand good. She perfectly straddles what feels like a unique American loneliness which, if pushed through, can become a splendid solitude. David Strathairn shows up and he also comes across as mighty real.
If you’re looking for action, just move along. But there is plenty to chew on here: our fragile economy, our social safety net (and the holes in it), makeshift communities, people looking out for one another, carrying on after loss, etc. And something that particularly struck me—how much of the classic American life are you able to digest? The house, the spouse, the kids, the dog, the 9-to-5? Some of us proudly swallow it whole. Some of us can partially handle it. And for some, it is just not meant to be. And I truly don’t think any of us are fit to judge someone else’s existence. But I do feel OK judging this movie, which I think is excellent.
Jack Silbert, curator