Some people need structure, while others abhor complacency. In her nonjudgmental way, Zhao invites audiences to decide for themselves what they make of Fern’s lifestyle, which comes with certain dangers: She could freeze to death in her van, food and first aid are sometimes hard to find, and certain aspects of her behavior might suggest mental health issues. The country was built by people who thought just like this, who broke from the comfort of the familiar to take their chance on the frontier - some by choice, others by necessity. In exchange, they taste independence as few sedentary folks do. These free-range loners reject the ideal of family, homeownership and fixed roots that now passes for the American dream. The idea was not so much to adapt Bruder’s book as to embrace what she had chronicled: a segment of self-anointed wanderers, many of them past retirement age but still obliged to pick up odd jobs where they can. Fern may be a composite, but Zhao surrounds her with genuine itinerants - a mix of the upbeat eccentrics profiled in Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century” and drifters whom Zhao discovered in making the film. She now travels (and lives) in her run-down white van. It stars Frances McDormand as an invented character, Fern, a 60-something Nevada widow who lost her house when the gypsum mine that had propped up the town of Empire closed for good, scattering the residents to the four winds. Like Zhao’s previous film, micro-masterpiece “The Rider,” this rich and resonant celebration of the American West straddles the border between fact and fiction, enlisting real people to play poetically embellished versions of themselves in order to reach a deeper truth.
0 kommentar(er)
