Nomadland is an extremely individualistic film. It’s a successful film, don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful portrait of a Woman of a Certain Age, grappling with grief and demons deeper still as she lives out of a van—not so she can document it on Instagram, but because she is at heart a spirit always in motion, and if she stops, she’ll die.
It is unfair to criticise a movie for what it isn’t, for all the things you think it should have been. So I won’t do that. It is neither Frances McDormand nor Chloé Zhao’s fault that Nomadland is a very focused, monochromatic story.
The lacunae in Nomadland are enormous, though.
It is nearly entirely white and, as such, nearly entirely devoid of the jeopardy that would face someone a few shades darker than Frances McDormand. Someone like me simply could not have slept safely in a parking lot anywhere in America; I could not have afforded one of those vans in the first place.
Perhaps most baffling to me is that McDormand’s Fern only ever meets nice, helpful people on her journeys. She, unlike me in 2017, never has to flee assault. She never has to weigh the emotional cost of staying another night in the home of some Fox News diehards who claim to have been, respectively, an Egyptian princess and a Chinese woman in a past life and have just given her the hard sell on joining their powdered drink supplement pyramid scheme.
Somehow, none of the people in Fern’s nomad circle are fixated on Nazi conspiracy theories; none of them are frothing libertarians. No one talks about Benghazi, or the death panels that will surely be starting up any day now. She doesn’t come across towns hollowed out by meth and burgeoning opioid crises.
Fern never encounters a single grifter, and while the sheer scale of grift happening in America today is likely greater than it was in 2012, it beggars belief that she would not encounter anyone who would to get her to buy gold or land or Iraqi dinar or even just essential oils. Everyone is dealing with their own sadness in a way that doesn’t seem to cause harm to anyone else, or even seem all that self-destructive. They are gruff, but empathetic; when, in my experience, even people who were quite generous with me would often reveal themselves to have deeply apathetic or hostile attitudes toward huge swaths of their fellow man.
Again, none of these lacunae are Nomadland’s fault. This is not a movie that set out to talk about the inherent racism of travel, or its inherent sexism; its purpose is not to paint a portrait of all of America beyond the margins. To expect it to do so is unfair. My feelings about this movie are entirely my own fault; the result of my own particular circumstances.
But I couldn’t help but feel an impotent rage building as I watched this movie. Hearing person after person tell me that my travels throughout all of America didn’t have enough of a “narrative arc” and as such did not deserve publication (a virtual requirement for getting something to the screen, these days), when we see now that there is space for this kind of movie, turned the beauty of Nomadland to ashes in my mouth. All I could see are the spaces that I can fill.