Rating: 2.5/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 49/52 | Made in Georgia (US State)
On January 31, 2011, due to reduced demand for sheetrock, US Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years. By July, the Empire zip code, 89405, was discontinued.
Fern opens a storage locker containing her belongings. She looks at them briefly before loading them up in her van. Fern finds a denim coat that belonged to her husband and holds it close. She pays off the locker and hits the snow-covered roads, stopping at Desert Rose R.V. Park, where she’ll stay in her van under the Amazon CamperForce program while working for Amazon during their peak winter season.
The following day, before sunrise, she works at the Amazon fulfillment center. She makes friends with some coworkers, including another older woman named Linda. A woman named Angela has a tattoo that reads, “Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?” a line from the Morrissey song, “Home is a Question Mark.”
While shopping at Walmart, Fern runs into people she knew before van life. They offer her a place to stay and share how worried they are about her. Linda shows Fern Bob Wells videos and tells her about his desert rendezvous in Arizona. Fern declines, insistent on self-sufficiency and finding a job. But she changes her mind when she cannot find a job and suffers a freezing night.
The film follows Fern as she learns how to survive her new nomadic life.
The film has a few actors but also several real-life nomads who get to speak about their lives. The movie has no explicit takes on these nomads, Amazon, or anything. We get a slow, somber meditation on these people’s lives and the tragedies that brought them there.
These are people that the US has abandoned. They cannot afford to retire, even at the right age, because they know they cannot survive on the benefits. They must travel, looking for seasonal work and finding it at places like Amazon, with exploitative and inhumane practices. Yes, some find community and support through folks like Bob Wells, who helps give them survival skills and convinces them they are subverting the capitalist order by living “off the grid.” But shouldn’t that be a choice and not a last option?
Chloé Zhao’s filmmaking is empathetic in letting these people speak for themselves. But what does a fictional story give us that a documentary wouldn’t have, other than an opportunity to win an Oscar? What is this film other than poverty tourism?