Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008) opens with a tracking shot following its title characters--the one a lonely drifter beautifully played by Michelle Williams, the other her dog--as they make their way across a field in an Oregon town. There is some light humming in the background, and this is one of the only moments of pure joy in a film that is otherwise interested in cataloguing Wendy's dire economic situation. After she tells a few people gathered around a fire in that same field that she's heading to Alaska ("I hear they need people there," she says), one of them, a guy with a painted face named Icky (Will Oldham), mentions a fishery up there that she should visit. She spends the night in her car, only to be waken up by the parking lot security guard (Wally Dalton), who tells her that she can't sleep there. Her car, meanwhile, won't start.

From then on, Wendy, facing one perilous situation after another (she gets caught shoplifting, she loses her dog), wanders around town in escalating desperation. Reichardt captures it all in brief, observational moments, and it is this lack of pretense that ultimately makes the film so moving and in many ways heartbreaking. On another level, even as Wendy and Lucy works remarkably well as an intimate portrait of its place (the Pacific Northwest) and time (now), it also subtly evokes aspects of American mythology that have been dwelled on by artists as diverse as Jack Kerouac (On the Road [1957]) and Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man [1995]). Yet, what makes Reichardt's project all the more interesting and layered is that while she's in some sense dealing with the idea of the frontier in a very topical manner, she's doing so by harking back not only to an American tradition, but to that of Italian Neorealism, and I'm thinking specificially of films like Vittorio De Sica's post-war masterpiece Umberto D. (1952), another work about living without a sense of economic stability.

Reichardt's deep awareness and unquestionable talent have allowed her to craft a film that is honest, patient, and calm. Williams's amazing and restrained performance forms, in Wendy, a character that never feels inauthentic. There's a beautiful moment toward the end of the film where the security guard, who has come to care for and help Wendy more than anyone else, hands her seven dollars and tells her to take it without arguing. The look on Wendy's face there, filled with such gratitude by this gracious gesture after so much despair, is a much more eloquent statement about the film than I could write.