Back in 2014, I had a blog post about a community of migrant workers that are not what you first think of when you use the term. I will not repeat what I said there but it is about elderly people who have reached retirement age without sufficient resources to retire. Following the recession of 207-2009, they used what little money they had to buy a van and convert it into a home and then drive around the country doing low-level temporary jobs such as stocking retailer warehouses and cleaning workplaces and parks and the like. They park in campgrounds that are often provided by the companies who are happy to obtain the services of older people who will accept temporary, minimum-wage jobs under poor conditions without complaining. There is even a name for them: workampers. (Someone who had been a workamper commented on my post.)

The post was based on a long article The end of retirement: When you can’t afford to stop working by Jessica Bruder that appeared in Harper’s magazine , which was later expanded into a 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In 2020, this was made into a film Nomadland that won three Academy Awards, for best picture, best director and best actor.

The film is made like a documentary. Apart from France McDormand as Fern and David Strathairn as another itinerant worker Dave, the entire cast consists of real workampers playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Fern’s story is based on that of a woman who had lived her life in the small company town of Empire, Nevada where the only employer was a sheetrock manufacturing company. When the company shut down in 2011, the town became a ghost town with everyone moving away to seek employment. Fern decided to convert a small van into a living space and join the workampers.

What the article, book, and film shows is that even though these people are transient, moving from campground to campground as they seek work, there is a real sense of community among them, even though they are together for just a short time before each moves away to a new job. Sometimes their paths cross again so that, as one person says, he never says ‘goodbye’ to anyone when they separate, just ‘See you down the road’. They help and look out for each other, sharing survival strategies, tips about work opportunities, cheap places to stop and eat, medications to use to deal with the aches and pains that their aging bodies experience as they do hard manual labor, sharing what little they have, and looking out for each other. Also at the back of their minds is worry about what will happen when they can no longer work or if their vehicle suffers a major problem that is too expensive to fix.

It is a slow-moving, reflective film, eschewing action and drama but conveying well the lives of a community of people that are all around us but invisible. McDormand is a wonderful actor, her lined face able to convey so many emotions without speaking.

The film received an R rating even though there was no violence or sex or even profanity as far as I can recall. No one got angry or even argued with anyone else. They just had measured conversations with one another, sharing stories about their lives. The only reason I could think for the rating was that there was a brief sequence of a few seconds that shows Fern floating naked in a river. I am not sure why the film makers included that sequence since it was not really necessary. Perhaps they wanted to get an R rating because it draws in a larger audience.

Here’s the trailer.