Reviewed--Nomadland

There are plenty of reasons to see Nomadland, if you haven't already. Two of them call out like sirens from the old epics, singing to the entire country. Tell you what, make that three because Nomadland now threatens to take over the Emmys. It's got lots and lots of nominations, including, of course, Best Picture. 

It's been two weeks or so since we went, just a couple days after it opened at just down the road. No, that night it didn't attract a crowd, and it likely won't. I don't know what its trailer looks like, but I'm sure it can't compete with most any block-buster because, to be truthful, Nomadland is a story set within the heart and soul of its central character, a woman who is not swept away by grief or circumstance but simply chooses to live unfettered, to wander at will through the American West. 

That character is named Fern, but Fern is played by Francis McDormand, who, even though she is not just another pretty face, is someone most people will recognize because of the mysterious force of character she brings to anything she does on the screen, including, most memorably, her starring role in Fargo. Francis McDormand is anything but Hollywood. She's unapologetically normal, and you can't help feeling all the way through Nomadland that she is, in essence, playing herself. If you didn't know better, you'd swear the movie is a documentary, but it isn't--it's scripted all the way through.

Francis McDormand is one reason we bought tickets just a day or two after it opened. You can't help but love her. Another reason is the role given graciously to American West, a region that includes us, but just barely. Mostly, all I have to do is cross the Big Sioux River and I'm in "the American West," twenty miles tops. The ads you might have seen featured the Badlands, a place where I've spent some time in the last couple years, an unearthly spot that makes most first-time visitors ask the same question: "What happened here?" 

McDormand is the movie's acting genius--she is Nomadland. The story is overwhelmingly character-based. Not a whole lot happens--no car chase, no drug busts, no wildly hypocrite preacher. Once Fern meets Dave, a quiet, sweet man played by David Strathairn, the plot suggests a blooming love story, but it doesn't go there finally because Nomadland wants its audience to wander just as peacefully as Fern and her friends, all of whom live in trailers that drift through the staggeringly beautiful American West. 

Not for a moment do you sit on the edge of your chair. What draws your attention--and holds it--is interplay between Francis McDormand, a woman essentially playing a role she finds in her own soul, and a yawning landscape that still delivers enough drama on its own to make you wonder why there aren't film crews galore running around through the open land just beyond the Big Sioux. 

Nomadland is unlike any other movie I've ever seen. It's heartwarming, but it won't make you cry. It's lovely, but you won't go buy the soundtrack. It's wise, but not a bit preachy. It's beautiful because, doggone it, Fern is, even though it's impossible to imagine Francis McDormand on the red carpet in some deeply slit hundred-thousand dollar dress.

It's not a love story, not a travelogue, not an expose. It's a intense and intentional portrait of people you don't really see everyday, even though if you live in a place like I do, you know them anyway. They're a displaced lot really, the central forces of their lives have simply disappeared, along with their jobs, and, in Fern's case, their spouses. 

But they're not frantic. They don't go all to pieces. They make do by becoming nomads and friends, and you can't help but think sometimes that they're the lucky ones. It would take me some time, I think, to come up with another movie that is only a portrait and nothing more. I'm reminded, in a way, of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a theological novel that features a good, good man readying himself for death. Gilead is the Rev. John Ames; it's his portrait. Without him, there's no novel.

Fern--and Francis McDormand--is to Nomadland what John Ames is to Gilead. They're both just wonderful. 

Nomadland is unique, in part, at least, because it's anything but "Tinseltown."