Nomadland

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1247592729?

Pieces of “Nomadland” have been all over my screens lately in an ad blitz for the film's release on Hulu. Starring Frances McDormand and directed by Chloé Zhao, it's also been at the top of Oscar forecasts for best picture ever since its release in festivals last autumn, which is when I saw it.

It's the story of a woman named Fern who's been living in her white Ford van ever since the gypsum plant closed in Empire, Nevada. It took her home and rest of the town down with it. Even the zip code was eliminated, as reported in Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” that the author and director adapted into the screenplay. Fern's husband died about the same time the town did, leaving her in her current state, homeless, rootless, adrift on the map of America like so many others in these changing times.

The ads highlight the magical realism of of Zhao's filmmaking that finds poetry in highways through nothingness, detects God's paintbrush in a sunset, meditates on the serenity of a barren landscape. In one scene Fern traipses through the dragon's tooth geology of South Dakota's Badlands National Park. When co-star David Strathairn calls down from the ridge to ask what she sees, she answers, “Rocks.”

That's Fern – no nonsense, vulnerable yet unbelievably tough, a spark of irony in her eyes, her flinty wisdom as solid as the ground she stands on. It's the latest role that could only have been played by Frances McDormand, more force of nature than Hollywood actress. She doesn't shy away from characters with names like Fern – she seeks them out. She doesn't have an army of managers and handlers freaking out when the studio synopsis matter-of-factly describes Fern as an old woman.

I can't remember which Coen brother she's married to, but she's won two Oscars all by herself. She flips the distinction between movie star and character actor upside down. She disappears into each role she plays … yet she's always unmistakably herself. I've been a fan ever since I thought she might have been making googly eyes at me in a hotel elevator during a 1988 movie junket for “Mississippi Burning.” I still am.

After losing her jobs in the gypsum plant and substitute high school teacher, Fern becomes a seasonal worker, doing time in an Amazon distribution center, flipping burgers in a roadside cafe, not averse to wielding mops or shovels. It's a marginal existence – car repairs, even a flat tire, can be economically devastating. At one point it requires the unthinkable – reaching out to her disapproving sister and her realtor husband for help.

Fern's travels in her van describe an odyssey across landscapes still majestic, but no longer young, bursting with possibilities as they were when Walt Whitman sang their praises. Stopping places along the highway are often gatherings of other van dwellers, whole communities on wheels of blue-collar seniors dispossessed by economics and other realities of modern America. They're not to be mistaken for another demographic of the new millennium – oldsters rich enough trade their homes in for half-million-dollar RVs, bursting with creature-comfort gizmos like faux fireplaces.

Fern's fellow travelers are a more modest bunch, everything they owned ingeniously arranged in utility vehicles designed to carry plumbing supplies rather than to support life. Their vans become part of their identities, like turtle shells. But then again, you don't have to be living out of your van to have learned new meanings of being without a home in these welcome-to-the-future times.

Most of the supporting cast of “Nomadland” aren't professional actors but actual nomads who go by their own names in the credits. Among them are Bob Wells, sort of a white-bearded cross between hippie guru and Santa Claus, who shows up at annual gatherings of the wanderers, like AARP's answer to Burning Man, their assorted wheeled dwellings sprawling across tens of acres.

For all the critical buzz and festival prizes “Nomadland” has won, I found myself surprisingly underwhelmed by the movie itself. It's fascinating sociological research into America in a new millennium, beset by a pandemic, economic inequality and an increasingly shaky self-image. But as drama, not so much. The clips in the ads feel like more than the sum of their parts. The subject was covered just as well in a lot less time on a segment last fall hosted by Paul Soloman on the PBS Newshour.

You can easily check out the segment online. But then of course you don't get Chao Zhao's visual poetry … or the unassuming enchantment of Frances McDormand in almost every frame.

“Nomadland” stars Frances McDormand, David Strathairn and Linda May. It's directed by Chloé Zhao. Rated R, its run time is 1:47. It's showing in theaters and available on Hulu.