But, save for Lucy, Wendy is alone the movie is essentially a solo turn.
Lucy, played by Reichardt’s own dog, is a suitably charismatic mutt, and Wendy does encounter a few locals, notably a pitiless garage mechanic (Will Patton) and a sympathetic security guard (Walter Dalton) who charitably allows her to use his cell phone as her contact with the dog pound. At one point, she laboriously crafts a few signs to paste up, captioning Lucy’s picture, “I’m lost!!!” as though the identification were total. Wendy walks around hopelessly calling for her-it’s the worst day of her trip, if not her life.īy mid-movie, Reichardt has succeeded in defamiliarizing the whole notion of a dog-or, rather, making it synonymous with Wendy’s humanity, which is to say Wendy’s inchoate yearning. By the time she returns to the supermarket, Lucy is gone. Delivered with equal adamancy, his is the movie’s key line: “If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t have a dog!” Wendy is booked, photographed, fingerprinted (twice, as it’s a new machine that the cops are not totally familiar with), and fined $50. With its quiet camera and fondness for long shots, Wendy and Lucy is so relentlessly understated that it comes as a shock to notice that the supermarket employee who grabs Wendy as she leaves is wearing a crucifix. Her beat-up Honda dies as she’s passing through a small Oregon town waiting for an estimate on repairs she knows she’ll never be able to afford, she drifts into a supermarket and, overcome by the spectacle of abundance, pockets a beef jerky and some dog food. Reichardt has described her movie as a post-Katrina story: Although it’s never made obvious, Wendy apparently lost everything except Lucy in some previous catastrophe. This prescient tale-which, like her previous feature, Old Joy (2006), Reichardt adapted from a story by Jon Raymond and shot in the Pacific Northwest-is haunted by lonesome freight trains, hobo jungle solidarity, and the idea of redeeming empty beer bottles for gas money. Introduced calling for her dog, Lucy, Wendy loses first her liberty (briefly), then Lucy (again), and finally, her car in the course of a dead-end road trip from deepest Indiana to the Alaskan frontier. Modest but cosmic, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy-shown this past fall in the New York Film Festival-is a movie whose sad pixie heroine, Wendy (Michelle Williams), already skating on thin ice, stumbles and, without a single support to brace herself, slides into America’s lower depths.
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