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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Wendy and Lucy

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#1 of 1 Posted 9/22/08 9:49 PM

From harveykarten Posts 798 Last Feb-7
To All [Msg # 23457.1 ]

WENDY AND LUCY

Oscilloscope Laboratories
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten
Grade: B+
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
Written By: Kelly Reichardt, Jon Raymond, based on Raymond’s short story “Train Choir”
Cast: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, John Robinson, Will Oldham, Walter Dalton
Screened at: Park Ave., NYC, 9/22/08
Opens: December 10, 2008

There’s a big difference between traveling as John Steinbeck did when he wrote “Travels With Charlie In Search of America,” and the way the vulnerable Wendy does in Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy.” Steinbeck traveled in a recreation vehicle across the land, writing about the different kinds of people he met on the road—using his dog Charlie to get people to warm up to the conversations. “Wendy and Lucy,” co-scripted by Jon Raymond who wrote the short story “Train Choir” from which this is based, is about a woman in her late twenties who is traveling with virtually no money on the one hand to find better opportunities than are offered in her town of Muncie. Indiana. On the other hand, she has little support at home, her only contact apparently her sister who, upon hearing a call from Wendy, says to her husband “What does she want now?”

Who knows how many Americans are in a similar boat: Estranged from their families, virtually penniless, with few options except to hit the road? You’ve got to admire Wendy (Michelle Williams) for her tenacity. New York or L.A. is not for her. She’s going the distance to Alaska, where the streets may not be paved with gold but where jobs in fish canneries are allegedly plentiful. She is determined to get away from her roots, since her roots are not supporting her for reasons unknown to us.

Kelly Reichardt’s aims appear to be to give her audience an image of alienation, a tale of anomie that could have come from the pen of Albert Camus. Her most important previous work was as director of “Old Joy,” about two old pals who reunite for a camping trip in Oregon, discovering that you can’t go home again: you cannot revive friendships that existed many years earlier. “Wendy and Lucy” is likewise situated in Oregon, also in a small town that overlooks some woodland, the kind of place that makes big city slickers wonder what the attraction is.

Wendy, then, is traveling like Steinbeck with a dog, but only because Lucy, or Loo as she’s called, is her only friend in the world. Her journey is fraught with uncertainty since she has limited funds, no credit cards, and a twenty-year-old Honda Accord on the verge of passing on. She does meet a slice of Americana, or at least folks from the Pacific Northwest, who are not particularly interesting, but they do serve to focus our attention on Wendy’s moods—almost bipolar depending on the situation of a particular day or hour. When she is caught shoplifting by a grocery store clerk who comes across as a young fascist, she is prosecuted—driven to a police station where she is held for hours, fingerprinted and photographed as though she were a suspected terrorist. During her time in absentia, her dog Lucy disappears from the gate outside the food store. Most of Wendy’s time in this eighty-minute film are spent in search of the dog.

The one decent individual she runs into is a security guard at a parking lot (Walter Dalton), who at first chases her and her car from the parking lot where she tried to sleep, but who emerges as a human being in several ways. A service station mechanic (Will Patton), gets her broken-down Accord towed to his service station where his repair estimates throw Wendy into the depths of despair. As photographed by Sam Levy, with close-ups to show every nuance of Wendy’s anxiety, “Wendy and Lucy”—so minimalist that the only tones on the soundtrack are a symbolic copy of her humming—the film examines humankind’s duties to one another, how some of us fall through the cracks and are threatened with psychological oblivion. In her young life Wendy has apparently been defeated so often that she has no motivation to fight.

The film stands out as the work of a grand storyteller, one designed for a special audience that seeks not escapism but the challenges of learning more about the human condition. “Wendy and Lucy” premiered at the Cannes Festival and was featured at this year’s New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

Not Yet Rated. 80 minutes. © 2008 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

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Harvey Karten's Reviews

Review: Wendy and Lucy

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