Nomadland Review

Zhao shoots the American West as a series of parking lots and pre-dawn shifts, and the film's refusal to dramatize is the whole point. Fern loses a company town, a husband and a zip code in the first two minutes, and everything after is logistics: a bucket, a van heater that fails, a seasonal warehouse job that ends on schedule. Frances McDormand plays her without a single beat of self-pity, and because most of the people around her are real nomads playing themselves, the performance has to lower itself to meet them rather than rise.

Joshua James Richards shoots at the two hours of the day when the light is doing something, and the badlands and the beet fields carry the weight the script declines to. Swankie's account of her own diagnosis is the best scene in the film, and no actor delivers it. Nomadland has been fairly criticized for how gently it treats the warehouse that helped create these lives, and the criticism sticks. What survives is the texture: work, weather, and a woman who keeps choosing the road because the alternative is a spare room in somebody else's house.