At the
beginning of Kelly Reichardt's deeply affecting Wendy And Lucy, a young woman, en route to Alaska in hopes of
getting a job, stalls out in small-town Oregon. Soon enough, it becomes clear
that she's little more than a busted timing belt away from utter ruin. Without
putting too fine a point on it, Reichardt subtly underscores the predicament of
a person living without any margin for error, which in these desperate economic
times has become tragically epidemic. Shooting with the same plain-Jane naturalism
she brought to her last film, 2006's lyrical Old Joy, Reichardt reduces the story to a simple, direct
series of cascading setbacks and an ever-narrowing set of options. Lacking the
resources to bail herself out of her situation, her heroine has to make
heartbreaking choices just to survive.
In a
gratifyingly low-key turn, Michelle Williams plays a quiet loner heading
northbound in a beat-up old economy car with her beloved dog Lucy. When the car
breaks down, she's coasting on such a thin budget that she's forced to sleep in
the back seat until the local mechanic (Will Patton) opens up shop in the
morning. Anticipating steep repair costs, Williams tries to shoplift some
essentials from a grocery store, but she's caught, arrested, and hauled away
while Lucy remains tied to the bike rack outside. When she's finally
released—and, to add to her excruciating ordeal, has to take a public bus
back to the store—Williams discovers that her dog is missing, and embarks
on a roundabout journey to find her, aided only by a kind old security guard
(Wally Dalton) who lets her use his phone.
Reichardt
deliberately obscures the circumstances that brought Williams to this
place—a phone call to her estranged sister only affirms her
rootlessness—and chooses to focus instead on Williams' mounting
desperation to find her dog, fix the car, and get the hell out of town before
she loses all her money. Having the dog around raises the emotional stakes
tenfold, and develops a kinship with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic Umberto D., which also revealed societal
ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship. As with Old Joy, Reichardt has an excellent sense of proportion: She
doesn't try to do too much, but what she does do is fully realized.
Animal-lovers are hereby advised to bring the Kleenex.