Williams) and her loyal mutt Lucy are stuck in an Oregon town when
their car finally drops dead. After tying up Lucy to a bike rack in
front of a grocery store and, alas, getting nabbed for shoplifting some
cans of dog food, Wendy returns to the scene of the crime and is unable
to locate Lucy. The balance of the drama concerns Wendy’s cathartic
search for the pooch, with the kindnesses of some strangers—like a
compassionate security guard (Walter Dalton) and an auto mechanic (Will
Patton)—filling some of the emotional divide.
Again, there’s not much going on as the
film moves from one plot point to the next: Wendy getting booked and
fingerprinted, Wendy frequently calling the dog pound (although she has
to scrounge for loose change in her Honda to use a pay phone), Wendy
jotting down her fleeting expenses in a journal decorated on the
fringes with doodles. Yet somehow Reichardt does a lot with very
little. When Wendy gets busted at the store, the overzealous kid (John
Robinson) who catches her in the act says, “If a person can’t afford
dog food, she shouldn’t have a dog.” A homeless guy interrupts Wendy’s
snooze on a cardboard bed in the woods to rant about the world: “They
can smell the weakness on you,” he says as he recites the societal
bum’s rush to “move along.” And the security guard commiserates with
Wendy’s various catch-22s: “You can’t get an address without an
address. You can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed.”
Lost-dog day afternoon: Michelle Williams stars in Wendy and Lucy.
Reichardt and co-writer Jon Raymond were reportedly spurred to pen Wendy and Lucy
after Hurricane Katrina wreaked its nightmarish havoc on New Orleans’
disfranchised, a time worst exemplified when former first lady Barbara
Bush offered her jaw-dropper concerning the evacuees at the Houston
AstroDome (“So many people in the arena here, you know, were
underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”) Wendy and Lucy
isn’t a finger-wagging anti-Bush administration screed, but its roiling
sense of anger is acutely understood, perhaps even more now that the
Dow is closing in on the 6000 mark. Reichardt’s quiet movie has the
primal heft of a Depression-era Warner Brothers social drama, albeit
relocated to the 21st century; one scene of a nocturnal Hooverville has
today’s pierced punk generation huddling around a campfire. Williams is sufficiently deglamorized to
portray her fragile waif, and she makes every screen moment count for
something, from Wendy washing up in a grungy gas-station restroom to a
brief phone call in which she checks in with her uncaring sister, in a
scene that somehow reveals plenty of backstory about her family
relationships. It’s a spare performance flaked with teensy details,
like the manner in which Wendy rubs her clothes on street signs, in the
dim hope that maybe Lucy will notice her owner’s scent and can find her
way back. Williams’ existential dilemma neatly holds together Wendy and Lucy,
an effective character study that accords a measure of dignity for
those who live on life’s margins. You’ll never look at the unfortunates
who must still sleep under, as an example, the I-690 underpass on
Hiawatha Boulevard, in quite the same way again.
—Bill Delapp
