This film deserves all the awards and praise: Nomadland reviewed

Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best Film In Which The Woman In Her Sixties Isn’t The Least Developed Character In The Screenplay, Hallelujah, About Time, it would have scooped that too. Not much competition, regrettably, but you have to admire the film just for that, plus there is much to admire generally.

It is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by the journalist Jessica Bruder, who spent months living with older Americans who, out of economic necessity, eke out a living while travelling from place to place for seasonal employment.

It’s been fictionalised here, mostly, and stars Frances McDormand who is somehow more beautiful than any beautiful actress, if that makes sense. I just love her face, and everything she does with it. She plays Fern and we know from the off that Fern is in the throes of grief simply by the way she handles a denim jacket. She is, it turns out, recently widowed and lives in a former mining town where there’s no work and she can’t afford to stay. So she hits the road in the van she will live in and which she has made quite cosy, despite the ‘poo bucket’. She is never self-pitying and takes whatever employment she can whether it be at a beet-processing plant or a restaurant or an Amazon fulfilment centre (aka warehouse).

The film has received criticism for presenting Amazon as quite benign when we all know it’s pure evil (she says, while simultaneously ordering something wholly unnecessary to be delivered by 10 p.m. tonight). But one of the joys of Nomadland is that it never becomes an outright heavy-handed polemic.