[9.4/10] *Nomadland* is an unassuming period piece, taking place roughly a decade before it was released. You wouldn’t know that beyond a few stray mentions of dates and times and the presence of a couple old cell phones that could be written off as the tech available to the film’s titular nomads. The movie centers on those travelers, getting by in desert campouts and parking lot largesse and the wide spots in the countryside. The places they inhabit feel simultaneously weathered and timeless enough to resist being dated.

And yet, it’s hard to imagine a film more salient to our times. Palpable in the very premise of the film is the sense of things left behind by a society with not enough care for the least of us. The precious possession, animals, and even people cast aside because there’s no one there to care for them permeate the film’s consciousness. It is, in its way, a blistering indictment of the community that would prompt its denizens to resort to such desperate, if resourceful, measures for want of other choices.

But it’s also a movie about loss, about the way that our connections to the people closest to us create roots deeper than any particular place, even places with warm beds and hot food. When those roots are torn up by illness or death or a changing economic landscape, it may be hard, if not impossible, to put them down ever again. Coupled with the practical reasons for adopting this lifestyle, *Nomadland* delves into the psychology of it, the sense of deep bonds severed that lead to a rootlessness even in those blessed with the options to settle down someplace.

The embodiment of this situation is Fern, a widow from a mining town in Nevada that withered on the vine when no one needed sheetrock anymore. The film follows her travelogue over the course of a year and beyond, rambling the countryside to wherever there’s work or community enough to sustain her. We see the world through the window of the van that doubles as both her transportation and her shelter, as she makes friends, muddles through as best she can, and scrapes by on a combination of hard work and the kindness of strangers.

Writer/director/editor Chloé Zhao lends this journey the air of naturalism it deserves. There are no big speeches here, little in the way of plot or firm structure. Instead, the movie laudably takes on the spirit of its protagonist, salt-of-the-earth wandering mixed with the buoying and complicated tangles of human interactions brought to the foreground. It’s a film that ambles, and sometimes stutters, but always in tune with the atmosphere Zhao aims to create and the internal feelings that Fern conveys.

It seems bold to say for an actor as deservedly decorated and venerable as Frances McDormand, but Fern may be her magnum opus. Fern is not a character who tells people what she really thinks or feels, almost to a fault. But in the tiniest expressions on McDormand’s face, the shifts in body language or sense of palpable discomfort when something seems too close or just close enough, she communicates those sensations and sentiments to the audience clear as a bell.

That thoroughly lived-in performance matches beautifully with *Nomadland*’s stunning cinematography. Director of Photography Joshua James Richards shoots astounding vistas from across the American landscape, finding beauty in desolate old towns, desert flora and fauna, and faces lit by fires crackling from the ground and stars shining from the night sky. The sense of loneliness mixed with human connection, of tininess within a vast natural world, comes through in the wonderful collection of images Zhao and Richards present.

It matches with the deliberateness of Zhao’s approach here, buoyed by soothing but melancholy piano-based score that adds feeling to the movie’s empty spaces. There’s something propulsive about *Nomadland* in its way, sinking into Fern’s endless search for the next odd job, the next temporary solution to her problem, the next friendly face who offers solace amid the ceaseless wandering. But Zhao also isn’t afraid to pause and show Fern simply being, to focus on the smaller moments of her life and experience that make the character and journey seem so real and viscerally felt.

Her plight comes through in the tough choices she makes in the first half of the film, and the fellow travelers she connects with grappling with the same. Through Fern, the viewer hears stories of sickness, grief, and other methods of falling through the safety net that prompt people to learn to live out of their vans in faraway places. No one ever articulates it, short of the nomads’ resident philosopher, but there’s the sense of these individuals having been victimized by a system that no longer has use for them, wanting to detach and start anew somewhere that they’re not bound by it.

It results in an inherent transience, but also deeper, liberating ties to the natural world in spare moments of grace and beauty. People flit in and out of Fern’s life -- Swankie, Linda May, Dave -- each leaving an impression on her but finding ways to move on as time and necessity progress. The joy and renewed loss of these fleeting but no less meaningful bonds animates the film, as we see small doses of stability and community infused into Fern’s life before they’re drained away by her road-bound existence.

And yet, even there, she has a certain peace away from the hustle and bustle of mainstream existence, one we learn she eschews by choice. That’s the striking turn in the second half -- learning that Fern is not wholly a nomad by necessity, with opportunities to settle down with new friends and old family. But her eccentricity, her courage, keeps her more comfortable drifting from place to place than putting down stakes again.

Ultimately, the film ties that to the loss of her husband and, eventually, the loss of the town where they made their home. It’s an irrevocable sort of grief, one that keeps Fern at a certain distance even from those who would welcome here, for fear that laying down roots again would be a betrayal to his memory, a wiping away of what he meant and the life they built together to try to replace in with anything half as sweet or stable. As time marches on, Fern seems to find some peace in this too, in the sense that all those lost souls will be met again a little on down the road, and it keeps her moving.

There is something irrepressibly timely about that tack. *Nomadland* does not shy away from the economic circumstances and uphill climb that leave so many straining to keep a foothold in the ever-shifting terrain of subsistence and prosperity. At the same time, it leans into a communal loneliness founded on loss, cut only by the warmth of the dribs and drabs of human connection that fade in and out of one’s life. It’s a message that is, like Fern herself, made for all seasons.