This is one of those hard-to-review movies for me.  It is a critically acclaimed adaptation of a non-fiction book, anchored by a two-time Oscar-winning actress, filmed across seven states, offering a unique, challenging, largely unknown perspective of modern American life.  Truth be told, it has almost no traditional entertainment value.  It’s a series of vignettes of one character surviving, living her uneventful life from time to time, from one remote spot to another.  And yet it covers lots of ground, inviting viewers to think about the American experience in their own ways.

Chloé Zhao’s film follows Fern (Frances McDormand), an itinerant laborer from Nevada all around the West following the death of her husband.  She lives in a van she continually improves upon, traveling around and working when she can, meeting people at RV parks and occasionally interacting with larger groups.  She befriends Dave (David Strathairn), who takes a liking to her, but she finds it difficult to reciprocate his feelings.  Fern even returns to visit her sister for a while, but she cannot bring herself to stay with her family.  Fern has become a woman of the road, forever destined to travel rather than settle down.

Fern is almost as enigmatic as Lawrence of Arabia to me.  She genuinely likes people, and wants to help them, but she cannot be around them very much.  She is rarely lonely even though she is constantly alone.  She is careful, yet reckless.  She cherishes nature and cannot bear to sleep in a normal bed.  She has what I think is an antisocial nature, and yet people in the film love her.  Almost everybody in the cast are real, actual people playing themselves, which adds yet another surreal layer to the narrative.

What works are the natural landscapes of America, captured as Fern and others experience them, which can best be witnessed on a personal level.  Also, the mundane yet sensitive statements and actions of marginalized people having to face these empty landscapes, itinerant work, health issues, loss of family, loneliness and personal peril (which is rarely an issue).  On the plus side is absolute freedom and the beauty of the world, and the backdrop of people who do care nearby when they are needed.  Mortality and capitalism and corporate responsibility are each examined in their turn, and other themes are present as well.

That’s the conundrum of this movie.  What must be for some an empty shell of a story will be for others a profound journey toward what rural America has become.  For some this will be a completely foreign perspective, and it will be unimaginable that they might ever experience what Fern does.  I can see it, for all my materialistic ways, but I hope never to undergo such poverty, personal rewards though there may be.  On the other hand I would love to tour the West as Fern does and see some of our country’s places in such an honest way.  Ultimately this is one of those films that you will either respond to on a basic, fundamental level, or you won’t.  I can appreciate what the movie conveys, but it is a cautionary tale to me, not a positive exploration.  ☆ ☆ ☆.  2 March 2021.