Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy (2008, Director: Kelly Reichardt): I had heard a lot about Kelly Reichardt after her last film Old Joy won both crit­ical acclaim and a number of awards. Though I still haven’t seen it (what? another film I haven’t seen? someone’s about to revoke my film blogger’s union mem­ber­ship soon!), I’ve been led to believe it shares a sim­ilar slow and med­it­ative pace with her latest film. But while Old Joy examined the nature of male friend­ships, Wendy and Lucy explores darker ter­ritory. Michelle Williams plays Wendy Carroll, a young woman on her way from Indiana to Alaska, where she hopes to pick up a well-paying job in a can­nery. Though we get hardly any back­story, it’s clear that Wendy is from a poor family and has a lim­ited edu­ca­tion. We watch as she care­fully tal­lies her cash and keeps a record of her spending. She’s very much alone on this journey, except for her dog Lucy, who seems more like a family member than anyone she’s left behind. An unlucky car break­down in a small rural town in Oregon leads to a dis­astrous chain of events that tears away the shock­ingly thin sense of security Wendy clings to. First she loses Lucy, and then has to leave the car in for repairs. In one fell swoop, she’s lost her family and her home (she’d been saving money by sleeping in her car). It’s very clear from Reichardt’s film how pro­foundly rural life has changed in the last fifty years or so. Everyone she encoun­ters is either indif­ferent or hos­tile, with the excep­tion of a fath­erly security guard, and even his modest attempts at kind­ness seem creepy in light of the town’s over­whelming inhos­pit­ality. So much for the kind­ness of strangers.

Despite the rel­ative lack of dia­logue, there are a few choice lines in the script. A super­market employee sneers, “If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t own a dog.” And when Wendy asks the security guard for change to use the payphone, he hands her his cell­phone instead, observing that “no one uses a payphone any­more.” I’ve been reading a lot of James Howard Kunstler’s books lately, and his cri­tique of sub­urbia rings very true in this film. Car cul­ture has des­troyed our sense of com­munity, and tech­no­logy has only suc­ceeded in sep­ar­ating us from our neigh­bours. Wendy has been told by her gov­ern­ment that she’s on her own, that she should pull her­self up by her own boot­straps, and she is willing to try. But what if some­thing unex­pected hap­pens. Don’t we all need a little help some­times? The thought that kept run­ning through my head was that if this could happen to a pretty white girl with a cute dog, then what about a Hispanic single mother, or a black man? These are the people who are strug­gling right in front of our eyes, and our indif­fer­ence or hos­tility is con­demning them to dif­fi­cult and lonely lives.

Michelle Williams is never less than com­pel­ling in this unglam­orous role. I’d been impressed with the depth she brought to her sup­porting role in Brokeback Mountain, but here she’s in every frame. Her stoicism and determ­in­a­tion barely cover her vul­ner­ab­ility and loneli­ness. In one scene, she’s con­fronted in the middle of the night by a deranged home­less man. As he demands she keep silent, her eyes express the terror of not knowing whether she’ll live or die. After he leaves, she quickly gathers up her things and runs back into town. As she enters a gas sta­tion restroom, her break­down is heart-wrenching. The film’s ending is ambiguous, which under the cir­cum­stances is the best way it could have ended. People like Wendy are sur­vivors, and with or without friend­ship or sup­port, they’ll go on. Hopefully, this por­trait of one of the “invis­ible” poor among us will help us to pay a little more attention.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Kelly Reichardt from after the screening:

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Duration: 15:45

(8/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, poverty