film, eyeballs, brain

At its core, Wendy and Lucy is simply the story of a woman and her dog. The film doesn’t expand much further beyond that, really – it’s cinematically and narratively pared down to the bone as it is – but its simplicity is deceptive: tucked inside its fluorescent-lit hallways and Walgreens parking lots is a richly evocative and moving film.

Wendy and Lucy is also a road movie. Wendy (in a quiet, controlled performance by Michelle Williams, here very far away from Capeside, MA) is driving from Indiana to Alaska because she’s heard there’s work to be had up north, with her dog Lucy in tow. But it’s a road movie which goes nowhere; it gets stalled almost at the very beginning, when her car breaks down in an equally rundown part of Portland.

Reichardt’s style is minimalist and unadorned, the camera unobtrusively and steadily following Wendy as she brushes her teeth in a gas station restroom, or as she picks up used aluminum cans for recycling by the side of the road. There’s barely a soundtrack, except for the little tune she hums softly to herself.

And so one might say, wrongly, that “nothing” happens, or that “little of consequence” occurs – but that is precisely the point. What the film accomplishes is a recalibration of priorities, such that what we see as seemingly inconsequential has been magnified into earth-shaking significance when one is at the brink of economic ruin. Wendy methodically calculates her expenses – on a second viewing I glimpsed a pathetic entry for “Hot Dog $1.50 / Trail Mix $3.00″ — in a notebook filled with doodles of flowers, so we are constantly made painfully aware of how little money she has. (I couldn’t have been the only one in the audience mentally counting her money, anxiously performing rough calculations in my head.)

Williams plays Wendy with a stoic, determined vulnerability, drawing from seemingly exhausted inner reserves; it’s a genuinely revelatory performance that easily bests her other work, both comedic (in Andrew Fleming’s Dick, from 1990) and dramatic (Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, from 2005). It’s important to note here that she hardly verbally communicates her desperation; it’s all seen only on her wonderfully expressive face, and it’s an essential component of Reichardt’s disciplined direction.

What’s also interesting is, in my opinion, the absence of a spiritual dimension to her travails. I’m thinking here, just off the top of my head, of other heroines, old and new – in chronological order, Lisbeth Movin in Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Florence Delay in Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Nora Aunor in Bernal’s Himala, just about any woman in any Lars von Trier film since Breaking the Waves – and while the comparisons aren’t really apt, there is instead something strikingly secular, something essentially material, about Wendy’s abjection, probably because Reichardt locates it in the mundane. (Come to think of it, this secularness seems particularly American as well.)

Indeed, the movies I mentioned above are far too momentous, too “dramatic”, in comparison. Perhaps closest in tone to Wendy and Lucy – and surely the latter’s shots of trains and railroad tracks are something of an homage – is Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. But while the latter is engaged in more overt political critique (the film begins with Umberto and his dog at a protest rally to have their pensions raised), Wendy and Lucy is a far quieter film in terms of laying any blame, even if it’s set in these days of looming global depression.The wealthy don’t even figure in Wendy and Lucy, for starters.

In Wendy and Lucy, it’s the small but numerous and painfully ordinary indignities inflicted by an implacable, heartless bureaucracy that take their toll. But having written that, I realize that the bureaucracy isn’t exactly “heartless”; it’s just people “doing their job”. And it’s not a bureaucracy she’s up against, either; it’s the sum of her social interactions with strangers — grocery store clerks, security guards, office assistants, mechanics. When she makes a wrong decision, about twenty minutes in, it’s completely understandable. Whether it’s “excusable” or “inexcusable” isn’t the interest of the film — it makes its point and moves on — but it does call into question the expansiveness of our moralities.

It’s hard to overstate Reichardt’s rejection of melodrama – almost parallel to Wendy’s refusal to break down or ask for help – or the determination to not let emotions, at least until the end, rise to anything above a simmer. The film is so carefully modulated, that when Wendy is the recipient of a tiny, unexpected act of kindness from a stranger, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

I think the reason Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has been so wildly popular in these economically precarious times is because of its traditional, classically Hollywood sense of cosmic justice: order is restored, good triumphs, and villainy is vanquished. But there’s a deeper, perhaps more sincere sadness in Wendy and Lucy – absolutely one of the finest films I’ve seen in the last twelve months – but it’s a message that movie audiences probably would not want to hear.

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