Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic

driven world of Earl.

Just take the essentials with you, no binding ties.

Where I lay my head is home, sort of, as James Hetfield sings.

Cliché.

But the American myth of freedom is also a viable troop - which in itself is not American at all, it is only the Yankees who kidnapped it and incorporated it into their vehicle cult.

In Nomadland, the myth does not shimmer as enticing, where the motorhome is a last resort for the poor.

The need is scarcely transformed into a dream of freedom.

Like most

road movies, Nomadland depicts a journey towards the realm of the middle, that is, one's own Self.

Here also mixed with a lighter social critique, which is not in the text but in the situation it paints.

The fund is a nation that offers thin safety nets with large holes, a body of society that consumes people and then spits them out when they get old and fragile.

One of them is Fern, a widow who buys a motorhome, hooks up for odd jobs, rolls across the country, gets to know like-minded people in the same situation.

They are solitaires who still draw strength from each other.

Sometimes they meet in Bob Wells' camp, a Vietnam veteran whose life's work is to help people escape the "dollar tyranny".

The director

and screenwriter Chloé Zhao, herself an immigrant Chinese, has in all her three feature films so far portrayed a United States in the margins, seen from an external perspective.

However, her first two works flew far below the media radar, which Nomadland probably would have done if it were not for the fact that the always acclaimed indie queen Frances McDormand plays the lead role.

Now the praise, the awards and the Oscar nominations are hailed.

There were six pieces and many believe that Nomadland will win both directing and best film.

Which would still be remarkable, it is not often such a narrow film as this one wins the finest Oscar.


Frances McDormand will probably grab a figurine for herself as well.

Bob Wells

does not win any awards, because he really exists and plays himself, like 90 percent of those involved in front of the camera, which makes Nomadland feel like a documentary with a few fictional elements.

And when they are so few, and come in such a worn, everyday context, they stand out as beacons: amateur, amateur, amateur, oh: David Strathairn!

Well, even a relatively unknown actor like the latter makes the illusion falter a little, just for a second, but still.

But Chloé Zhao's

quiet narration (and Joshua James Richard's suggestive photo!) Takes us by the hand again and lets us follow Fern on her melancholy odyssey.

There are steaming bison, the vast prairie, the big redwood trees - the American mythological soil in backlight.

Together with the film's humanistic basic tone, it becomes a tribute to the original, to other values ​​in life than those measured in dollars and cents.

A bit banal, it may seem, but so nicely and discreetly performed that it becomes pictorial poetry and harsh realism in one and the same breath.