An Oscar Contender Considers the White Working Class

T hroughout the entire history of the Academy Awards, the Best Picture trophy has never gone to a film primarily about the economic plight of white working-class Americans. On the Waterfront probably comes the closest, although that is more of a Mob drama about tribal loyalty.

And On the Waterfront came out 66 years ago. As the white working class turned away from the Democratic Party, Hollywood lost interest in the white working class, even as three of the last seven Best Picture winners have covered the sufferings of black Americans. So it’s surprising that perhaps the leading Oscar contender of the year so far, Nomadland, depicts the WWC with poignance and sensitivity, albeit with a left-wing spin. It walks the line between art and propaganda, which is why it’s an Oscar picture.

Nomadland, which is showing at the New York Film Festival ahead of a December theatrical release, opens with a somber title card reading, “On January 30, 2011, due to a reduced demand for Sheetrock, US Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years.” So wholly abandoned was the town that the Postal Service shut down its zip code. People were dislocated as though by a Dust Bowl–sized calamity, but this nightmare is man-made. The film is a successor to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath for the age of singletons, and like Ford’s masterpiece, it sprinkles sentimentalization into grit so deftly that it’s a marvel.

As Fern, a quietly resolute widow who lives out of her shabby white van while she drifts from one menial job to another, Frances McDormand gives a rigorously understated performance that is sure to win her another Academy Award nomination. (She has already won twice; only six actors have won it three or four times). Her hair shorn, her face unadorned, Fern cleans toilets, serves coffee, cleans grills, and (kudos to the director for not cueing up Darth Vader’s theme music here) even works as a picker at an Amazon warehouse for the holiday season. Moving from one parking lot or campground to another, eating Campbell’s soup warmed up on a hot plate, forced to poop in a plastic bucket, she never bemoans her fate. Fern is battered without being wounded, losing but never defeated. She’s a low-key American icon, and practically every scene of the film uses her plight to restate its thesis: There is something deeply wrong with this country if people such as Fern have to live in a motor vehicle. At one point, Fern runs into a kid she once knew, and we learn that she was a substitute teacher, and as she quotes Shakespeare from memory the viewer’s fury is meant to build: How can such a beautiful soul be living such a hard existence?

That’s where the sentimentalization comes in: Fern and all the other human tumbleweeds she encounters on the road are decent, kindly souls. Oversimplifying is part of the game in Hollywood (this film comes to us from the Walt Disney Co. via its art-house-subsidiary Searchlight Pictures), especially when you are trying to win Oscars bestowed by a class of people who have a demonstrated fondness for being led around by the nose to a conclusion they already believed. But surely there are bad people in trailer parks, just as there are in C-suites.

There is no chance of anyone missing the point of it all. “You are one of those lucky people who is from the United States,” someone says, and Fern walks by a small-town movie marquee reading “THE AVENGERS” to remind us what kind of film this isn’t, although unlike The Avengers, Nomadland was made for rich people, the only ones who patronize the art-house cinema. Snippets of ironic Christmas music pop up here and there on the soundtrack in a desolate un-Christian desert of hope, and director Chloé Zhao sometimes places an American flag in the background as a troll (surely poverty is a tad more woeful in her native China?). There are hints that Fern lost her house because of the crisis of 2008, so bankers are to blame.

Nomadland is based on the nonfiction book of the same name, by Jessica Bruder, and mixes in some real-life nomads to enhance the verisimilitude, which is already impressive thanks to the washed-out cinematography and the location shooting across many Western states. Bob Wells, a sort of RV evangelist, appears in the film as himself, offering a mixture of practical tips and thunderous denunciations of capitalism. He hosts a festival for wanderers where people who live on the road sing around the campfire and thrill to speeches sharing thoughts like, “We not only accept the tyranny of the dollar, the tyranny of the marketplace, we embrace it!” We learn that “the Titanic is sinking and economic times are changing,” so we must “get as many people into the lifeboats as we can.” Wells’s book on how to live on the road is sold on Amazon, and his YouTube videos extol various name-brand products above advertisements for his merchandise. Anti-capitalism has always proven to have strong consumer appeal, and I look forward to this movie turning Wells into the Martha Stewart of rootless living.

Another real-life nomad who lends the movie some ballast is Swankie, identified by the same name in the credits (though her full name is Charlene Swankie), who is an aging fellow vagabond Fern meets along the way. Swankie is running out of options and gets a lovely two-minute monologue in which she serenely contemplates her own death, exactly the kind of scene that reliably earns Oscar nominations.

In a sharply etched late sequence that draws this plotless film together while presenting a haunting gallery of loss, we finally get a look at the town of whose sad dissolution we learned at the outset. We’re meant to think of an Old West boom town that collapsed because a rumor of gold turned out to be mistaken, or maybe what remains after a zombie plague: Reality tops sci-fi again. Nomadland is what the Times columnists mean when they decry “late capitalism.” I suspect that the film’s spell would be broken if we knew which presidential candidate its cast of characters preferred, but entrancing the audience is what the movies are all about, even the ones that kind of look like documentaries.