Chloé Zhao puts Frances McDormand among real van-dwellers in the American West and mostly lets them talk, and the result is patient, plain and often moving. It is gentler on the warehouse than the people in it deserve.
The film opens with a card. Empire, Nevada, had a gypsum plant; in 2011 the plant closed, the company town emptied and the zip code was discontinued. Fern (Frances McDormand) lived there with her husband, and now he is dead and the town is gone. Chloé Zhao, who wrote, directed and edited, and produced with McDormand and Dan Janvey, adapts Jessica Bruder’s book about older Americans working seasonal jobs from their vans, and she puts one professional actor in among the people the book is about. We recommend it, and warmly, with one reservation that grew on the drive home.
The people are the point. Linda May and Swankie play women called Linda and Swankie, and they are not acting so much as being filmed, which Zhao has done before with the South Dakota cowboys of The Rider. Linda May, at a campfire, tells how she worked all her life, checked what she would have to retire on, and looked at the gas on the stove for a while before her dog looked back at her. Swankie sits on a rock and describes kayaking a river as hundreds of swallows lifted off a cliff and their eggshells drifted on the water beneath her. We did not expect to cry at a description of birds told by a woman we had never heard of, and we did, because Zhao holds on her face and does not cut to the river. She lets us imagine it, and imagining it is the whole of the scene.
McDormand’s job is to listen, and she is good at it. Fern is not a saint. She is short with people, she walks off when conversations get warm, and she plainly prefers the van to any spare room offered to her. McDormand plays her small: a lot of the performance is the back of a head in a driving seat, or a woman squatting in the scrub with a bucket, and the film treats the bucket with the same seriousness as the sunsets.
Joshua James Richards shoots almost everything at the edges of the day: low sun on rock, blue light through a windscreen, a small figure walking away from the camera across a flat. He is also credited with production design, and the van, with its shelf of patterned plates and its curtain and its single burner, is the most lived-in set we have seen in some time. Hannah Peterson keeps Fern in the same padded jacket and knitted hat for months of story, which is right; nobody here has a wardrobe. Zhao cuts her own footage and likes to leave a scene a beat early, on a look rather than a reply. Ludovico Einaudi’s piano comes in over the driving and, once or twice, over a face that was doing fine without it.
Now the reservation. Fern’s first job is the Christmas rush at an Amazon warehouse, and Richards shoots it clean and bright and orderly, yellow vests moving among tall shelves. Fern seems to like it. The book has things to say about who profits when a woman of retirement age sleeps in a car park to sort parcels, and the film declines to say them. It is not that Zhao should have made a lecture. It is that she has made a film about people who lost everything and been vague about why. One or two critics raised this; most did not. We think it costs the film more than they allow.
David Strathairn’s Dave is the other soft spot. Strathairn is as unshowy as ever, and Dave is a decent man, but his is the one strand you can feel was written: his scenes have beginnings and endings where everyone else’s just stop. Against The Rider, which had no star and hurt more, this is a smoother piece of work. It is also more generous, and it gets away with a good deal on the strength of two women talking by a fire.
It runs 108 minutes and carries a 12 certificate, and it will not frighten anyone. Watch it on the biggest screen you have and turn the lights off, because Richards’s dusk is half the film. Then look up what Bruder wrote about the warehouse. The film would rather you did not, and that is our only real complaint.
