Nomadland

One of the more positive by-products of time travelling through my past selves and dredging things up to the surface has been rediscovering my love of films. I’ve also rediscovered a passionate interest in chocolate. I’m going with it. There are worse things to discover, and let’s face it, I have discovered a lot of them over the past six months.

In my late teens and early twenties, I used to go to the cinema several times a week. As a teenager, the flea pit cinema in my home town used to make Monday and Thursdays, ‘every showing a pound,’ days. My friends and I went to see everything, multiple times. It didn’t matter what it was, we went to see it. We practiced lying about our age to get into that cinema with far more discipline than we ever did trying to get into night clubs. As a result, I have a fairly encyclopaedic knowledge of the films of the Eighties. My favourite memory of that era was bunking off school one afternoon with my friend Denise because we wanted to see Pretty in Pink. When we got there, the film had already started but as we were the only two people in the cinema, the projectionist rewound it to the beginning for us. It’s the closest to being a celebrity I will probably ever get to feel.

Later, the girls’ father and I shared a mutual love of films. As well as a terrific independent cinema, there was a fantastically eclectic video shop in Jericho in North Oxford, where we lived. We would spend hours debating which films to rent. We watched all kinds of strange things, but perhaps my fondest memories are reserved for my exes’ very manly best friend who had a secret weakness for period dramas. I relish the afternoon we bunked off to go and watch Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility and then went back to do it again the following week because we had enjoyed it so much.

Then, when children and divorce came along, my interest in watching obscure French films went the way of all things. I loathed taking the children to the cinema, not just because most of the films were horrendous (I am still very resentful that I spent good money on and had to sit through The Wild Thornberrys - and it came out in 2002), but because there was no chance of nodding off in the darkness. Someone always needed a wee, or a cuddle, or a firm hand. I got out of the habit of watching films. My attention span eroded. People like to blame social media, but I blame lack of sleep plus having to have eyes in the back of your head thanks to having kids. The few times I did sit down to watch stuff, unless it gripped me in the first ten minutes I would either fall asleep or wander off.

Getting back my film mojo over the last few weeks has felt like a bit of a gift. It’s been a delight to see things that I want to watch, instead of having to reach consensus with anyone else. I can finally throw off the shackles of The Wild Thornberrys.

Last weekend I finally got round to watching Nomadland. Jason was sat next to me, half watching, half reading his book. At one point he got up and went away to do something or other. When he got back he said: ‘Hasn’t anything happened yet? It’s been so long.’ It’s fair to say that it wasn’t his cup of tea, but it was very much mine.

It’s based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Jessica Bruder. It explores the lives of the transient population of increasingly older people in America. It tracks their adoption of van life as they travel the country, moving through the gig economy. So many of them are trying to piece together a new life for themselves after the more traditional lives they had plummeted off the rails.

Frances McDormand plays the lead character in the film, a sixty year old woman whose marriage took her to a town built around an industry her husband died servicing. When the industry folds in the recession, the town goes with it, leaving McDormand high and dry. She buys a van and heads off to find work and some kind of meaningful life in a country that has resigned her to the scrap heap. Just another casualty of the late capitalist economy.

McDormand is always worth watching. From the first time I clapped eyes on her in Fargo when she uttered the immortal line: ‘You have no call to get snippy with me, I’m just doing my job here,’ I have loved her. I didn’t think she could better Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but here I think she does. Where Three Billboards is a whirlwind of rage and grief, loud and so very insistent on being witnessed, Nomadland is so quietly furious, you don’t even notice how angry it is until you’re suddenly gripped by it.

In this film, McDormand is the victim of the stealthy, unfolding horror of a life disappearing out of reach. The camera lingers on her. Like the weather, barrelling across the landscapes she crosses, emotions tumble across her face. You watch the physical effort she makes to try to hold everything together in the creasing of her forehead or the narrowing of her eyes. As the camera closes in, there is nowhere for us to hide. We have to witness what this life is costing this woman.

The focus on McDormand’s face reminds me of the photography of Dorothea Lange, who took her camera out into the streets and photographed dispossessed and down and out families migrating across America in the wake of the Great Depression. Her most famous image is probably Migrant Mother. A close up of the face of a woman desperate for work and food, making her way to a migrant camp with her two children. She too, struggles to retain her dignity in the face of overwhelming despair. The photographs and the film both share a beautiful brutality and a refusal to shy away from the cost of economic hardship in real, human terms. There is nowhere else you can look.

The difficulties of van life, the small frustrations that can so easily spiral into big disasters, the constant compromises and indignities play out across the vast, indifferent landscapes of America. There is so much beauty in the cinematography but so much quiet menace. This is a land that doesn’t care about you and your puny woes. This is a land that relentlessly marches on, working to timescales so vast and ancient, a human life is of no consequence. We often see McDormand sitting on the edge of a valley, on the lip of a landscape, driving down a ribbon of tarmac with the sea boiling below. This is not a comfortable place to settle. This is an existence poised in the balance and any, tiny thing can tip it over the edge.

The film sits in the great tradition of American myth-making, where so often we see one man, pitting himself against the wilderness and triumphing. This film though, is less sure of itself. This is less On The Road and more Grapes of Wrath. So much is lost and the victories are small and fleeting. McDormand finds a community, but it is a peripatetic one, where people come and go according to their own migratory patterns. Absence is threaded through the story and there is more of an acceptance of what must be rather than any sense of victory. We do what we have to to survive, and there is a beauty in that.