Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt
2008

After her revelatory breakout feature "Old Joy" (2006) Kelly Reichardt offers up another brilliant and enigmatic picture with "Wendy and Lucy." These two films, particularly the latter, are blazing a the trail along with Lance Hammer's "Ballast" (2008), towards a new American realist cinema. Michelle Williams brings her big Hollywood name to this little film in the titular lead along with her canine costar Lucy (playing herself). Roustabout Wendy's journey to seek employment in Alaska leads to an unforeseen pit-stop in the Pacific Northwest thanks to some untimely auto failure. Once Lucy goes missing Wendy's already fragile plan begins to crumble as money runs low and help is hard to come by. In Reichardt's expansive landscape new characters and locales generally take on an episodic feel. An early encounter with a group of anarcho-punk hobos, face tattoos and all, seems a portent of things to come, while the unsympathetic teenage grocery store clerk is a sour portrait of ugly America. A slowly tracking camera takes in each dog at the pound, deliberately and objectively. These are people and places suffering from a subtle, quiet decline. The kindly parking lot security guard who aids Wendy on multiple occasions bemoans the lack of jobs in town. Indeed, the film's modest homes, cracked asphalt, and encroaching vegetation are more suggestive of devolution than glossy modernity. Sam Levy's cinematography is hit or miss with a combination of lovely camera moves and natural lighting muddied by a handful of needlessly pretentious angles. Wendy's fierce, if naive, independence, honesty, and unselfconscious sense of cool make her the kind of heroine that the hacks directing Michael Cerra movies would kill for. At this point it's kind of a "no doi" to say that Reichardt is one of the most interesting and important directors working in the U.S. today.