'Nomadland': Film Review | Venice 2020

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'Nomadland': Film Review | Venice 2020
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In Chloé Zhao's haunting third feature Nomadland, Frances McDormand plays a disenfranchised widow from a collapsed Nevada mining town who finds new life on the road. Read THR's review:

, Chloé Zhao established a spiritual connection to the American West, with its immense skies and wide-open landscapes that speak equally of desolate solitude and of freedom. Working primarily with nonprofessional actors playing versions of themselves, she specializes in stories carved into the bones of her characters, their communities and the remotes spaces they inhabit.

McDormand plays Fern, a stoical, hard-working widow in her early 60s who has lived her entire adult life in a company tract house provided by the United States Gypsum Corporation in Empire, Nevada. A drop in demand for sheetrock led to the closing of the mine there in 2011, and the place became a ghost town, its zip code discontinued within months.

She might fit the conventional picture of the American underclass, but her dignity, her self-sufficiency and her romantic kinship with the drifters of the Old West set her apart, without obscuring her pain and vulnerability. Under Zhao's alert, compassionate gaze, that portrait extends to the many people Fern meets as she bumps along from one destination to the next.

Bob Wells, whose YouTube tutorials on van dwelling have a sizable following, sums up the credo of the mostly older nomads that make up the scattered community, many of them carrying the weight of grief and loss. He eschews final goodbyes in favor of a more upbeat"See you down the road." Scenes at one of Wells' seminar camps early on show Fern learning basic skills such as stealth parking and"how to take care of your own shit." Literally.

Even the more conventional narrative threads are seamlessly interwoven so as to seem organic, such as the soft flickers of attraction between Fern and mild-mannered nomad Dave . Ditto when engine trouble with her vehicle, nicknamed"Vanguard," sends Fern to visit her sister Dolly for a loan. The enduring affection between them is as poignant as the distance that keeps them apart.

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