SPOILER ALERT: This review contains plot elements
If you have ever hesitated between staying in a stable life or continuing down the road, Nomadland (2020) is a film worth watching.
Written and directed by Asian American filmmaker Chloé Zhao, Nomadland is a road film shaped by the aftershocks of America’s financial crisis.
Through a gaze that is both gentle and powerful, Zhao portrays people living without a fixed home in contemporary society. The film won both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Picture.
The story is set in the winter of 2011. After the U.S. Gypsum plant closed after 88 years, Fern lost her job. Soon after, her husband dies, and she also loses the familiar community, friends, and stable life she once had.
In order to survive, she packs all her belongings into a van and begins travelling across America. Along the way, she keeps meeting new people, and keeps saying goodbye to them. Through these moments of gathering and parting, each person moves on toward their own path.
What remains after loss
Nomadland does not treat death, ageing, and parting as the end of life. Instead, it understands them as ways in which life continues in another form.
As Chloé Zhao said in an interview with AFI, when she met many real-life nomads, she often asked them, “How would you like to be remembered?” This also echoes the questions the film keeps returning to: Why are we here? Why do we feel pain? And after losing everything that once defined us, how do we begin to understand ourselves again and find a way to keep living?
The film stays closely focused on Fern from beginning to end, and the deepest force pulling at her is still the memory of her late husband. Through meeting different people and hearing their stories, Fern is slowly healed. Yet her longing does not disappear. It remains quietly in her life and in the way she keeps moving down the road.
That is why the line at the end of the film, “I’ll see you down the road,” feels especially moving. It is not a certain promise, but a more mature kind of comfort. Some viewers may see loneliness in the film, while others may see freedom.
We are always afraid of loss and separation, but the film does not try to comfort us with a simple answer. As it suggests, grief and loss are inevitable, and many people may never fully get over them. But that is okay.
Speaking through images
Nomadland does not rely on dense dialogue. Zhao does not ask her characters to keep explaining themselves. Instead, she uses natural landscapes, facial expressions, body language, and the camera itself to convey emotion.
Not everything in Fern’s journey is calm or romantic. She survives on temporary jobs, spends cold nights alone in her van, and often worries about money. The film keeps reminding us that the pressures of modern life are always there, and that nomadic life is never an easy escape.
However, the film beautifully frames this nomadic way of living as a reclaiming of autonmy.
When Fern looks up at the stars with other nomads, and in the montage where she stands on a mountaintop and shouts her own name into nature. These moments need very little dialogue, yet they are enough to let us feel a brief but genuine sense of freedom.
What is most valuable about this approach is that it respects every way of living. Zhao never asks her characters to fit into a dominant social order, nor does she treat stability as the only right way to live. To allow yourself not to belong, and to remain true to your inner needs, takes enormous courage.
How music talks
Nomadland builds its sense of drift not only through its images, but also through ambient sound and music, creating a soundscape that draws the viewer into the experience of being on the road.
Fern’s journey across America’s vast landscapes is accompanied by quiet, gentle piano and orchestral music. Most of the music was composed by the Italian composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi.
One of the most famous pieces is Oltremare. It is not dramatic, but it has a slow, flowing quality that matches Fern’s quiet presence on the road.
On Experience: The Ludovico Einaudi Story podcast, director Zhao said that she wanted the music to feel like Fern’s inner dialogue.
As Fern moves silently through changing landscapes, the music seems to speak the feelings she cannot express in words. It allows the audience to gradually sense her loss, her hesitation, her loneliness, and the quiet changes unfolding within her.
For those of us living in a state of drift, life on the road is not only a process of losing, but also one of gaining.
In many cases, you draw close to certain people and lands, only for everyone to part ways again and again, while you have no choice but to keep moving. After experiencing gain and loss again, you may gradually come to accept the transience of everything with a quieter, healthier sense of peace.
Final thoughts
No matter your current circumstances, follow your heart and move forward bravely and strongly. Once you set out, you’ll always meet fellow travelers along the way.
Life has no fixed answers. Everyone needs to find their own path amidst uncertainty.
Life is only 30,000 days long, so you can live it in a different way.
Original photos by Roujia Lin