Thanks to McDormand’s acting and Zhao’s naturalistic direction, Nomadland weaves together truth and fiction into a beautiful examination of life on the economic margins. Instead of drawing the audience closer to reality, this creative decision risks simply drawing attention to the film’s duplicity. While it’s not uncommon for directors to use untrained actors for verisimilitude, something that Zhao has done before, it’s rare to see untrained actors play themselves and interact with fictionalized characters like we see here. While Fern, played with an understated brilliance by Frances McDormand, is a fictional character, Zhao populates the film with actual van-dwelling nomads, like Bob Wells and others. It’s a little complicated.Ĭhloé Zhao’s deeply felt film chronicles the itinerant existence of Fern, a woman who has lost both her job and her husband and through both choice and circumstances, begins living out of her van. While Nomadland’s largely a work of fiction, Bob Wells is a real person, so who we see isn’t simply a fictional character in Nomadland, or maybe he is a fictionalized version of himself, even if he really is Bob Wells. We gladly throw the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar on and live by it our whole lives.” So says Bob Wells, a sort of van life guru, when we first see him in Nomadland as he’s speaking to congregants at a desert gathering. “We not only accept the tyranny of the dollar, the tyranny of the marketplace, we embrace it.
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