Frances McDormand in the film NOMADLAND. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2020 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved
The film takes us to a place in our heads we’ve been envisioning since the Pandemic, a sweet escape from our home, our lives, and our everyday realities. Frances’s performance seems so lifelike there are moments you forget it’s not a documentary about her living in her van. As more female-driven stories get Hollywood-level green-light, we see better storytelling that affects both men and women.
The film is refreshing at a time in America where there are no real guarantees about our future everyday lives. The film provides that sweet escape. What if you did lose everything – would your dignity go as well? I’ve always fantasied about living off the grid but almost experiencing homelessness myself in Los Angeles, I understand it from a different point of view. We figure home to be a safe space for your things. The story challenges us to think beyond the safety of our possessions to protect the safety of our life experiences. Some people leave high-paying jobs because money doesn’t equate to happiness. Yet when we see it translated on screen we feel dumb. Why do I care this much about this job? Is it because I’m scared of living on the streets? You can have a job in America but not a home. This week our government denied a federal minimum wage hike from $7.25 to $15.00. The story of Nomadland goes beyond finances. It’s about humanity’s struggle to survive in a capitalist nation. We forget to connect to the bigger world around us because we are distracted by the physical things in our lives while we miss out on human connections. While we miss out on living. Going to work every day is not living, it’s apart of surviving in this economy. There is a joy we feel when we feel safe in sharing our emotional state with other humans, specifically people who are strangers to us. There is freedom of expression in places such as AA and it’s because of the anonymous nature of the relationships. It is very healthy but it is very un-American.
Have you watched Nomadland on Hulu yet?
