Wendy and Lucy
- Directed by Kelly Reichardt
- Written by Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond
- Starring Michelle Williams and Walter Dalton
- Classification: 14A
Grinding wearily on the rails, the trains are just passing through, and so is Wendy. Passing through an exurban wasteland under overcast skies. Passing through a recession where jobs are either dried up or drudgery. Passing through a world of small cruelties and occasional kindnesses, at risk of sliding into a social vacuum where the absences are so basic - no cash, no mobility, no home address, no family that cares - that her life is dimming toward invisibility. Passing through a country, an era, a government, a system and dropping off its collective register. How can attention be paid when there's nothing to see?
That's the real purpose of Wendy and Lucy: to make us see this young woman, to attend to her present predicament - three days and nights stranded in a small Oregon town - and to wonder about her perilous future. And maybe to find a reason to hope, on her behalf but on ours too, because, of course, we're all just passing through. Such is the resonant magic of Kelly Reichardt's remarkable little film, one of those exercises in minimalism where every word matters, every shot counts, until the kernel expands and a whole world emerges in 80 brief minutes.
As she did in Old Joy, Reichardt is again working from a short story by Jon Raymond. Although the tale is elliptical, almost Carver-esque in its condensed realism, her methods are slow and unhurried despite the truncated running time. The camera stares fixedly and at length, a keen observer of the tiny but telling detail. Like Wendy's arrival into town in a battered Honda that doubles as her bedroom, accompanied by a golden retriever, Lucy, who may be her one friend. The car has Indiana plates; it's already travelled far. Wendy has money, yet only a small sum that's dwindling fast, with each disappearing cent meticulously recorded in a notebook ledger.
Morning dawns and a new day starts, but the old Honda doesn't - the first in a spiralling series of setbacks. A security guard (Walter Dalton) orders her to push the stalled car out of a no-parking zone, where it awaits the verdict of a hard-nosed mechanic. She washes up before the fogged mirror of a gas-station restroom, then wanders into a grocery store to shoplift some kibble for her hungry dog, only to get busted by a smug clerk and his "zero-tolerance" policy. Several hours plus a fat fine later, she returns from the cop shop to find Lucy missing. Someone suggests checking with the pound, located somewhere in the vast distance. Job-like in her patience, she starts walking.
So it goes, frustration compounding frustration, as she bounces from the official at the pound to the mechanic in the garage and back to that hovering security guard, standing bored sentinel over an under-frequented mall. All do what they can to help her, some more warmly than others, but it soon becomes worrisomely clear that these smaller crises are about to reach a critical mass, that Wendy's vulnerabilities are simply too many and too engrained not to end in disaster. But who is this frail creature and why should we care?
This is where the movie excels. In the classic neo-realist tradition, it's scant in plot yet rich in mood and character, offering us a revealing hint here, a poignant glimpse there, with each revelation filtered through Michelle Williams's superbly muted performance, all the more moving for being so restrained.
Who is Wendy, then? She's an androgynous waif with cropped brown hair, wearing a blue hoodie and bedraggled shorts. But the road hasn't toughened her, at least not yet. Rather, there's a quiet civility there, and reserves of intelligence too, but also a sort of careless passivity, a lack of foresight, a willingness to serve as the plaything of fate. These aren't sins, but they are flaws that can come with dire consequences, especially for those without a safety net. And, judging from her phone call to an indifferent sister back in Indiana, Wendy is definitely flying without a net. Ostensibly, her flight is north to Alaska in search of work. But when she says, "I hear they need people there," what she's really saying is, "People don't need me here."
Now why should we care? Because, as the film's most fearful sequence attests, there are too many loose cannons about, and she's prime fodder. Because, lacking our advantages, she deserves our protection, and that protection is a duty, a public tax that we should happily bear. (In a tender scene, the movie portrays the limitations of private charity: The good-hearted guard, angling his body away from the disapproving eyes of his bottle-blond wife, slips the waif a parting gift - six crumpled dollars.) And because Wendy, all the Wendys, have a genuine social potential that needs to be seen in order to be tapped. If you doubt that, watch and learn from and be profoundly touched by the ending, when the weakest among us delivers a lesson in uncommon strength - a pure act of selfless love, with none to bear witness and no reward in sight. Then, alone, she passes through.