For me Nomadland has the feeling of a study: a study of a certain type of person, including her personality, to what she's attracted, what she fears, and the kind of environments to which she is drawn. Taking all these features as part of the study of Fern, the character inhabited by Frances McDormand who won Best Actress for it, the film is a unified whole.
By the end of the film I was thinking, What a sad movie. But then I realized, no, it's not supposed to be sad. It's meant to portray a very independent woman who cannot be hemmed in by anything. Not by people, not by her environment, not by her own emotions. She is always leaving.
She's presented as someone who must be free to be her own mild-mannered self for whom the only bothersome thing is having her freedom taken away. Here, freedom means not being hemmed in by needs or commitment to anyone or anything. Her mood, as well as the overall mood of the film, is portrayed like the scenery: open, vast, peaceful and full of a certain kind of mellow beauty.
I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to her, especially because of scenes such as when Fern and other women she was with were checking out tasers, suggesting they should carry them as protection. Then her friend Dave (David Strathairn) warns her about walking alone at night in a certain area.
But ultimately those scenes I interpreted as foreshadowing amounted to nothing and for that I was really glad. The subject of potential harm coming to a woman on the road alone created a bit of tension, but the film delivered a happy message by not having that potential lead to anything.
In the end, it is a subtle yet moving film in which nothing spectacular happens.
By the end of the film I was thinking, What a sad movie. But then I realized, no, it's not supposed to be sad. It's meant to portray a very independent woman who cannot be hemmed in by anything. Not by people, not by her environment, not by her own emotions. She is always leaving.
She's presented as someone who must be free to be her own mild-mannered self for whom the only bothersome thing is having her freedom taken away. Here, freedom means not being hemmed in by needs or commitment to anyone or anything. Her mood, as well as the overall mood of the film, is portrayed like the scenery: open, vast, peaceful and full of a certain kind of mellow beauty.
I kept waiting for something terrible to happen to her, especially because of scenes such as when Fern and other women she was with were checking out tasers, suggesting they should carry them as protection. Then her friend Dave (David Strathairn) warns her about walking alone at night in a certain area.
But ultimately those scenes I interpreted as foreshadowing amounted to nothing and for that I was really glad. The subject of potential harm coming to a woman on the road alone created a bit of tension, but the film delivered a happy message by not having that potential lead to anything.
In the end, it is a subtle yet moving film in which nothing spectacular happens.