Zhao can't entirely blame the shortcomings on the script, because she wrote it -- developed out of the book by Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, which largely describes Bruder's road encounters with nomads, especially the character Linda May ("played" by the book's non-actress herself), and her friend Silvianne, on whom Fern seems to be partially based. It has characters, Bruder explains in the foreword, who hit the road because they "couldn't afford rent on top of paying off student loans," people locked into impossible economic binds, hustling to keep everything together. Others who are "are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class."
Bruder observes, "'Some call them "homeless.'" The new nomads reject that label." And she sums up the intuitive knowledge these people seem to possess about contemporary America:
Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they're at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.
It's an uncertain Utopia, if it is one, reminding me of folks in the former Soviet Union thawing out from the Cold War, zombie-like, at first, slowly waking....
And this vibe is delivered in the film by Bob Wells -- the real Bob Wells who encourages people on TV to become nomads and offers calm practical advice, like a TV fisherman who might offer tackle advice on a Saturday morning program -- here used as the next-best-thing to a revolutionary, teaching not Fight the Power but how how to survive what's happening:
We not only accept the tyranny of the dollar. We embrace it. We gladly live by it our whole lives. I think of the analogy as like a work horse. The work horse that is willing to work itself to death and then be put out to pasture. That's what happened to so many of us in 2008. If society is throwing us away and putting us out to pasture, we work horses have to gather together and take care of each other, and that is what this is all about.
Damn, if this image didn't conjure up the work horse Boxer from Animal Farm -- in the end, sent off to be rendered, only later recognized as the glue of society. But no talk of Let's Get Mr. Jones.
Language is subtly important in the film too, one in which there's a lot of silence, people driving, scanning the open countryside. When these bonds talk, it's simple plain speak -- no high falutin' modifiers, no hysterical politics, no wearying and off-putting rants of self-pity. Bryce, a veteran tells his succinct story at a campfire chat:
I'm a Vietnam vet and I got PTSD. I really can't handle loud noises, big crowds, fireworks. Bob helped me. I got a pickup truck and camper. I can live out here. And be at peace.
That's it. No rants about being let down by ingratitude or being mistreated by the VA. No MAGA blues are heard. So spare is this language usage that when Fern, towards the end of the movie, recites a Shakespearean sonnet ("Shall I compare thee"") her husband used to recite to her, the elevated, formal lyricism is striking, and seems to come from a lost world almost (the name, Shakespeare, is never even mentioned).
The language of understanding is missing, too. That seems to be another national crisis. When Fern's van breaks down and requires thousands of dollars to repair, and she is urged by mechanics to junk it, Fern, instead calls on her sister to loan her the money to fix her "home." The sister, Dolly, insists that Fern come home to pick up the money. The sister uses her return to lay a guilt trip on it in order to ground her, offering a place to stay. Zhao uses this moment to show the irreconcilable differences between the sisters -- Dolly, the comfy middle class success story, Fern, needing new horizons. In the end, Dolly hands her an envelope of the money she needs and that's it between them. They have little in common.
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