Kelly Reichardt (2008)

Wendy and Lucy runs only 80 minutes but so little happens that there’s plenty of time to wonder whether there’s more to it than meets the eye and ear.  Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is a young woman on her way to start a new life in Alaska, with her mongrel dog, Lucy.   Wendy has stopped off en route in a small town in Oregon and her car breaks down.  It’s never clear to what extent Wendy is alienated from either her family (in Indiana) or society in general but she’s low on funds.  When she’s arrested for shoplifting and detained for several hours in custody, Lucy, who was left tethered outside the grocery store where the thefts took place, disappears.   Most of the rest of the film is about Wendy’s search to find the dog.   I wondered whether Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond, with whom she co-wrote the screenplay (and who wrote the short story Train Choir on which it’s based), were making some kind of ironic comment on the road movie in general and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild in particular.   One of the saving graces of the road movie is that, however dire the film might be for the most part, there’s always the hope that it may improve as the traveller goes to different places and/or meets different people.

This is true, to an extent, of Into the Wild – the story of a young man, propelled by big ideas, whose voyage to Alaska brings him into contact with exotic flora and fauna and takes him through successive spectacular landscapes.  Wendy and Lucy is a road movie that goes nowhere and the reasons for the taciturn Wendy’s planned journey north remain obscure.  The only animal life we see apart from Lucy (and other canines – as the camera pans across the runs in a dog pound, in an especially unhappy sequence) are some pigeons on a telegraph wire against a bright blue sky (the most striking shot in the film).  The streets of the town and railtrack and scrubland around it are prosaic and the place seems more sparsely populated than the Alaskan wilderness.  Later on, I started thinking that ‘Lucy’ was maybe a contemporary inflection of ‘Lassie’ – a lost dog story in a society that doesn’t permit a happy ending, where the dog’s owner has no home to which her pet can return.  (I think I may have been desperate by this stage:   Lucy, according to the cast list, is played by a dog called Lucy.)

Because Kelly Reichardt’s style is drably minimalist and Wendy’s character and motivation remain unexplained, some critics seem ready to assume that the film is truthful and tough-minded.  I don’t think it’s either.  Seeing Wendy and Lucy so soon after The Class – which demonstrates triumphantly that you can use a documentary style to entertaining as well as psychologically penetrating effect – puts Reichardt’s film at a particularly acute disadvantage.  Even so, you’re prepared to sit through the nearly eventless minutiae that dominate the early scenes in anticipation of something gradually more substantial.  But the doubts as to how interested the director is in capturing reality – as distinct from devising scenes to lower your spirits – set in very soon.  Wendy, having discovered she’s got problems with her car, gets it pushed to the side of the street with the help of a friendly security guard, then takes Lucy’s things out of the boot to prepare the dog’s breakfast.  The big bag of dog food is virtually empty:  we’re supposed to believe that Wendy’s life revolves around Lucy but that she hadn’t noticed this before.  This prompts the shoplifting.  We’ve already seen Wendy working out how much money she has left and the total is $525 – it’s surprising that she would risk separation from Lucy for the sake of a few dollars.  (At the police station she ends up paying far more in a fine for the theft.)  Reichardt doesn’t give Wendy the chance, when she’s arrested, to protest that Lucy has to be looked after.  Wendy gets into the police car and it’s only as she’s being driven away from the store that she remarks, comfortably too late, that Lucy is still tied up there.   I had the sense with each of these moments that we were supposed to think that in-this-lousy-world the cards were stacked against Wendy.  (A more credible reaction is to think Wendy is alarmingly stupid and/or not so considerate a dog owner as we’d at first assumed.)  By the end of the film, I accepted that the cards really were stacked against Wendy – but that it was Kelly Reichardt who was stacking the deck.

Several of the select band of people that Wendy meets are not unpleasant:   the increasingly benign security guard (Wally Dalton), who lends her his mobile phone to make calls to the dog pound, and eventually gives her $15; the garage mechanic (Will Patton), who seems to offer her as reasonable a deal as he can for repairing and, when it proves to be a lost cause, disposing of her car; the affable, sympathetic woman at the pound (Ayanna Berkshire).  The store manager (John Breen) seems to decide to press charges only at the insistence of the shelf stocker (Michael Brophy) – and even he seems spurred more by the prospect of enlivening a dull day than by censorious malice.   The one signal exception is a man (just about invisible to me in the darkness in which the scene was shot) who comes across Wendy when she’s sleeping in woodland, in the hope that Lucy will seek her out there.   It seems probable – though it’s by no means clear – that this man rapes Wendy; she’s traumatised by their meeting, at any rate, but this aftermath is rapidly overtaken by the news that Lucy has been found and whatever happened in the wood isn’t referred to again.   But other people, whether nice or nasty, don’t seem to affect Wendy, who is so closed off that she comes over as almost pathologically unreachable (and occasionally ESN).

Michelle Williams, looking almost prepubertal, has her best moments when she suggests the force of Wendy’s impacted, unaccountable hostility.  When Lucy disappears and Wendy is calling for her, she sounds angry with the dog rather than anxious about her (or angry with herself); when the security guard first offers his mobile, Williams shows you how much it takes Wendy to say thank you.   But this still doesn’t tell us enough.  In Brokeback Mountain, Michelle Williams was more expressive in that one moment when her character saw her husband kissing another man and she seemed physically to shrink than she is in the whole of Wendy and Lucy.  I’m all for directors and writers deciding that crude expository dialogue is not the way to develop and describe character but the aspiration towards something more challenging is futile if, as a result, next to nothing comes through.   The effect of all this – especially since Wendy’s character quite dominates proceedings – is to make the difficulties of her life seem to derive from individual psychological problems rather than reflect some kind of societal malaise.

Kelly Reichardt’s minimalism is of a kind that makes almost any event or conventional expression look exaggerated and unconvincing.  In her first scenes, Michelle Williams is so meticulously downbeat that, when she has eye contact with the shelf stocker in the grocery as she picks up an apple, thinks twice and replaces it in the stand, she looks to be flashing her shoplifting intentions in neon lights.  (Wendy is the only person in the store so the stocker can focus his undivided suspicious attention on her.)   A real irony of Wendy and Lucy is that what keeps the audience interested is, I think, what keeps an audience interested in a old-style tearjerker lost-dog picture.  In spite of the fact that the human protagonist here is opaque and somewhat alienating, we want to know that her dog is safe and well; in fact, because we can’t care that much about Wendy, that’s all we want to know.

When Wendy and Lucy are reunited, Reichardt certainly succeeds in not making the moment heartwarming.  This is not only because you know that in the film’s universe there’s no possibility of happiness; it’s also because Lucy, although she seems a lovely dog, behaves as if she knows she’s in an indie picture rather than Hollywood.  This has to be a motion picture first:  a lost dog, back with her owner, exhibits muted, almost ambivalent affection.   It isn’t heartbreaking when Wendy decides that Lucy will be better off staying in the foster home to where she’s been tracked down:  this was the only moment at which I thought Wendy had had a sensible idea.  The last that we see of her is jumping onto a halting freight train with her remaining possessions in two bags:  the director appears to see her disappearing into the anonymous poverty of so many others in modern America.  But Kelly Reichardt pays the price here for her protagonist’s opacity (as well as for the visual cliché of someone in dire straits hitching a ride on a freight train – the depressive side of the same coin as riding off into the sunset).  I came out thinking that at least Lucy could look forward to a relatively stable and comfortable future.  That didn’t seem an altogether unhappy ending.

14 March 2009