This one is about a woman in her sixties who stuck around in a tiny mining settlement in northwestern Nevada even after her husband’s death⁠—but then, in 2011, United States Gypsum closed the mine and the entire company town along with it.  Unable to afford stable housing, this woman, Fern, adopts what has come to be known as #vanlife: living in her vehicle⁠—not an RV, in her case, but an actual regular old van, with a plastic bucket for a toilet⁠—and driving around from one seasonal gig to the next.  There’s no real plot, and thus I saw countless reviews describe this as a “tone poem”.  Back in my Usenet days, I probably would have written a pattern saying something like, “If anyone has ever described your movie as a tone poem, I automatically hate it.”  I’ll give Nomadland a partial pass on this count, though, because I was engaged by the look behind the scenes at Fern’s various jobs: putting together boxes at an Amazon warehouse; cleaning toilets at a national park; helping to manage a beet harvest; working the register at South Dakota’s monument to roadside advertising, Wall Drug.  The logistics of van life were also pretty interesting, and the scenery was nice.  The rest of the movie was a bit of a slog, though, which probably makes me sound misanthropic because pretty much what that leaves is people.  All the more so because, well, here’s how one review put it:

As interesting and memorable as NOMADLAND is, I do have an issue with it.  In cursory research I didn’t see anyone else with this complaint, so it’s probly just my weird thing, but I feel like I should mention that I found the specific way it combines reality and fiction very distracting at times.  I love the authenticity non-professional actors bring to movies, and they’re the most interesting part of this one. But at the beginning we’re being introduced to this fictional character of Fern and seeing how rough her life is and sympathizing with her.  And we understand that this is a fictional movie portrayal of something that’s a reality for many people.  But right away she’s talking to people who we instantly recog­nize are real people really living this way.

Who you callin’ “we” there, Vern?  I had no idea that these weren’t all actors until the closing credits started listing the supporting character names as if they were real people.  It turns out that this movie is a sort of hybrid between drama and jour­nalism.  It’s not 50/50, because the #vanlife people are playing fictionalized versions of themselves⁠—e.g., the real Charlene Swankie didn’t have cancer, and despite dying in the movie still somehow managed to show up for the Oscars⁠—but, yeah, most of the people we see on screen are people who actually don’t have fixed addresses.  But, again, the other place where I part com­pany with Vern here is the assertion that “they’re the most interesting part of” Nomadland.  Nah, they’re the least.

One thing that had me scratching my head a bit was that the most common criticism I found in reviews of this movie was that it seemed muddled about whether it was presenting a harrowing portrait of the casualties of our wintry economic climate or cele­brating the 21st century’s version of the American pioneer spirit.  But isn’t “the pioneer spirit” basically a euphemism for despera­tion?  Who’s going to risk their lives walking across a continent full of mortal dangers purely out of a puckish spirit of adven­ture?  That people would go to such extremes shows how ex­treme the shittiness of the economy has nearly always been, with teeming multitudes forced to choose between, on the one hand, starvation and suicide, and on the other, grasping at some shred of a chance of survival by undertaking an arduous journey into the unknown, on a rickety ship across the Atlantic or a covered wagon along the Oregon Trail.  And of course it wasn’t just the economy that put people to flight: the Mormon pioneers under­took the trek to Utah because when they lived in Illinois, mobs tried to murder them all.  The history of the United States is that of a multi-century refugee crisis.  But I guess “PIONEERS” looks better than “REFUGEES” when you paint it across the top of a high school gym.

Some reviews noted that not everybody in Nomadland was living in a van purely because they had no other choice.  Fern in particular has many friends and relatives who offer to take her in, but after a night or two with a roof over her head she inevit­ably retreats to her van, preferring to cling to a sense of indepen­dence even if it means shivering through frigid nights and being woken up by knocks on the windows.  And I have to admit that it was not economic necessity that once had me wondering whe­ther this might be a lifestyle for me.  Not living in a $5000 van, but maybe one of those luxury RVs, if the day ever came that I could afford one.  I figured that since I had a job that could travel with me, and I didn’t have a lot of stuff, I could pick a town, spend a couple of months trying all the restaurants, and then when I started to scrape bottom on the local culinary offerings, just move on to the next town.  But these days I mostly prepare my own meals, so now I can “move to the next town” just by picking up a new cookbook.  And I get to keep my plumbing.

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