One marriage, two movie reviews: Nomadland

Director Chloe Zhao, left, with Frances McDormand on the set of Nomadland. Photo / AP

Greg and Zanna confront the twin spectres of late-stage capitalism and camping.

SCORES
Bleakness of film's worldview: ?
Bleakness of central character's existence: ?
Bleakness of Amazon fulfilment centre: 5

SHE SAW
Greg has to be the only person on the planet who would come away from the film Nomadland thinking the worst part of being a nomad is sitting around a campfire with like-minded people sharing a communal meal. Such is his disdain for the outdoors. The worst part, quite obviously, is pooping in a bucket and the constant fear of being woken in the night by patrols ordering you to move on.

Chloé Zhao's Nomadland is a meandering and melancholy portrayal of life within the growing community of nomads in the United States. It's not bleak but Greg and I discussed at length whether it was hopeful or not. It's hard to say. The cast includes only two actors: Frances McDormand who received the Academy Award for her performance and David Straithairn. The remaining characters are played by non-actors, real-life nomads, and they seem, if not jovial, at least content with their lifestyle. The film's certainly not pitying but it is realistic: Their life is hard and it's not necessarily their first choice.

How happy Fern (McDormand) is with her life is so deeply wrapped up in her grief over the loss of her husband that whether she would choose a "better" life if she could is unclear. The film isn't even very interested in that question because there is no road back to home ownership, and few opportunities for employment for any of these people. It's a moot point.

The film's based on a non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder and is grounded in true stories of (mostly older) people who lost jobs and homes in the 2008 financial crisis. Zhao, who has worked with non-actors in her previous films, brings a heightened sense of realism to the film by working with the nomadic community and McDormand does a remarkable job of matching the non-actors' performances. It's a precarious melding of real life and dramatisation that could easily not have worked but for Zhao's confident direction.

It's hard to imagine a film like Nomadland winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards any other year but this one. Not because the film isn't fantastic but it's just that little bit further left of centre than the Academy usually recognises. It's kind of wonderful that last year, being such a strange one for the industry, allowed this film to get more of a spotlight than it otherwise may have. Unfortunately, it hasn't done anything for my campaign to take the family on a campervan holiday. For Greg, Nomadland just confirmed that life on the road is dangerously close to his worst nightmare: camping.

HE SAW

Because I was genuinely unsure, I asked Zanna if she thought Nomadland was a hopeful film. Initially, I had felt sorry for the central character, Fern, driving around the bleak wildernesses of the United States in a s***ty old van, spending her nights in bleak and dusty caravan parks and working in a series of terrible jobs, but the more the movie went on, the more it appeared maybe she wasn't as bothered by it as I was. She doesn't talk or emote much. Insights into her life and feelings? No, not many. You can read the movie more or less however you want.

The next morning, Zanna said, "I don't think it was hopeful as you do." I told her I didn't say it was hopeful.
She said: "You definitely did."
I said: "Where you're confused is that I said it offers a multitude of possible readings, of which that is one."

I tried to steer us carefully out of the endless he said/she said, by making the case for hope: I suggested the movie paints a picture of the corrupt and degrading influence of capitalism, which we have come to view as "Life" - the natural order of things - when in reality it's a system that has been created and developed to force us to exist within certain boundaries. In other words, it's a prison. As The Shawshank Redemption has proven, you can survive and thrive in prison, but only if you have the right connections, or access to resources, at which point you get to rewrite the rules in favour of yourself. In Nomadland, Fern escapes the prison, accidentally, courtesy of her town's economic erasure, the scales fall from her eyes, and she finds herself free, in the arguably beautiful American desert. That sounds hopeful.

But of course, she's not free. She still needs to access the prison's resources - gas, food, cell phone, coins for the laundromat - and is therefore forced to work, doing things like scrubbing s*** off toilet seats and taping up packages in the maw of a soulless Amazon fulfilment centre. How does she feel about it? It's not entirely clear. The more interesting question is how you feel about it. You can find hope anywhere, if you look hard enough, and if you're of a sufficiently optimistic disposition, which - as this movie has reinforced to me - I'm not.

Nomadland is in cinemas now, and is available for streaming on Disney+ and Neon.