wendy and lucy (2008)

Sure as your fate and hard as your luck

Judging on the strength of two recent movies I caught and rather enjoyed, the barren ignorelands of Oregon seems to be pretty fertile ground for American independent cinema. Gus Van Sant has often set his films in his hometown of Portland, and Paranoid Park (2007), when I caught it only at the tail end of last year, struck me as an extraordinary portrait of a suburban street culture inhabited by skater punks and throwaway mall urchins. Kelly Reichardt’s equally splendid film Wendy and Lucy taps into the same vein of youthful disenfranchisement that Paranoid Park mines so thoroughly, but quite differently and with a more understated air of stoicism that is perhaps even more enthralling than Van Sant’s mercurial reels.

Michelle Williams plays the titular Wendy, taking her dog companion Lucy on an arduous road trip from Indiana to Alaska, where apparently the young woman would be able to find gainful employment. Shit happens on their stopover at a small town in Oregon. Wendy’s meager travel budget is carefully calculated and yet she fails to account for dog food, an understandable neglect that bred petty mischief in the form of shoplifting. One thing leads to another, and Wendy loses her dog.

I have no idea how much Wendy’s (and/or Lucy’s) hard-luck tale is intended to be a parable for the everyman’s economic malaise but it is clear Reichardt assails these contemporary concerns with her own, uniquely austere vision of bummed-out cinematographic realism (an overly clunky label/description, I know): long shots cast over the township’s affectless landscapes, foggy nightfalls take on a spectral quality, and automobiles run inexplicably into ruins. Keeping with the film’s neorealist edge is William’s restrained performance, accurately capturing the vulnerability and dogged persistence of her character. The compendium of bleakness and unexplained circumstances at the heart of Wendy and Lucy is held together by the recognizable devotion of Wendy towards her canine pal in spite of her feckless means of existence. The final heartbreak comes in the form of a classic drifter’s escape, as Wendy hobo-hops onto the boxcar of a freight train with a glimmer of lukewarm hope, riding towards everywhere.