But these are matters that the director, Chloé Zhao, is uninterested in documenting. Repetitive-stress injuries, falls, and endless shifts take a deep toll on these workers, and there’s a hot La-Z-Boy in hell for the person who decided to demand 12-hour shifts from people in their 70s. These jobs-whether at Amazon or another employer needing a cheap, disposable workforce not seeking benefits or commitments besides an hourly wage-are things that young bodies are built to perform, not old ones. They have come to the end of the line financially, any promises made or implied have been broken, and most of them have some other kind of precipitating issue that has put them on the road. It also introduced readers to the Amazon program that capitalizes on their misfortune and is named, in the fun, up-with-people style of corporate branding, CamperForce. It’s adapted from a deeply reported book by the journalist Jessica Bruder, which expanded on her scorching 2014 Harper’s cover story, “The End of Retirement,” documenting the subculture of older, broke Americans who live in their vehicles. Everything is more dangerous when you’re female.ī elieve it or not, Nomadland has been criticized for romanticizing Fern’s life and that of the other nomads. Afterward, she all but runs back to the van, something a man probably wouldn’t understand, but every woman can. The camera pulls back and we see that it’s not a stream we’re hearing she’s peeing- displaying all the vulnerability and indignity of a woman peeing outdoors. In the next scene, she’s crouching down on a wide, cold piece of ground in the endless expanse of the great American flyover, the only sound the trickle of water from some nearby stream. She’s already in the life, and it’s our job to keep up. But what I admired very much about the movie was that we didn’t have to sit through a first act of how she made the decision to live on the road, and how she learned the practicalities of managing that kind of life. The conventional movie moments in the film were kind of a drag. That’s not the last of that china I’ll be seeing, I thought to myself, and I was spot-on. In the end, she chooses the least practical thing of all: a box of china, white with a pattern of red leaves on the rim. Fern is there to pick out what she will bring with her on the journey. You spend your whole life accumulating things, and then they end up in a storage unit, slowly losing their charge of sentiment and memory and transforming into a bunch of junk. Personally, I could have watched an entire movie on that subject alone. The make-or-break moment for the viewer is right at the top if you’re the kind of brute who doesn’t enjoy watching a woman in late middle age poke around her storage unit, you should take your leave. The simple premise of the movie is that Fern (Frances McDormand), a woman deeply grieving the death of her husband, has decided to leave her home and join up with the ragged fraternity of workers-mostly old people-who live in their vans or cars, and who follow seasonal work the way migrant farmworkers follow a harvest. I can’t believe I’m watching this, I thought, but when the movie ended, I let my money ride and watched it again. I never want to see people getting out their guitars and inspiring sing-alongs, and like the Miller in The Canterbury Tales, I am a bit squeamish about farts. I hate message movies, and speechy movies, and movies in which complex and seemingly intractable problems are solved through movie magic. I live my life on the fading dot where these four demographics converge, and I found the movie powerful, informational, boring, generous, and hopeful. It’s a popcorn picture for the damned-and so it spoke to me. Nomadland is a movie that appeals to the four quadrants of the show-business apocalypse: menopausal women, people with life-threatening illnesses, people interested in poverty, and anyone with time on her hands who can’t find the remote. The much-reviled four-quadrant theory of moviemaking holds that a blockbuster appeals to all four sectors of the audience: young men, young women, somewhat older men, and somewhat older women. Even pressing the Play button on Hulu is a test of strength do you have the stones to watch this plotless, dreary semi-documentary about elderly people forced to live in vans-and, yes, perform unspeakable bodily functions within them-and search for seasonal work? Or are you going to be a little baby and watch The Bourne Identity for the kabillionth time?
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