I just finished watching Wendy and Lucy (Finally! Tick that one off the list!) and…oof! Must love dogs but then also make achingly hard choices! In a nutshell, Michelle Williams is on her way to seek work in Alaska with her dog in tow when things go awry. It was as precise and wonderful a Kelly Reichardt joint as her previous film Old Joy. The best aspect of Wendy and Lucy is that it is a Quiet Film. In the sense that there is no bold score underlining and accentuating the emotional arc, no superfluous soundtrack, no musical underpinning. As a Quiet Film, W&L is all ambient sounds, creating a poetry of sorts, out of tires thwapping on wet pavement, birds chirping, half-heard conversations, trains rumbling and the swooshes of supermarket doors and the hum of air conditioners and the rattling of pocket change. The most noticable musical underscoring being the tune hummed by Michelle Williams’ character Wendy (as A.O. Scott correctly noted).
Not that anyone should want to subsist on quiet indie films alone! I’m not some celluloid-enshrining alternafop! I like bold scores by John Williams, and explosions, and dewy, athletic, choreographed coitus. But I do appreciate the counterpoint as well.
Reichardt, adapting once again as with Old Joy a story by Jon Raymond, succeeds in making a film a meditation. She manages to preserve the quality one gets reading a story, as opposed to taking fiction and hammering it into the confines of popular cinema. Like Old Joy, this is an examination of friendship, albeit one focusing on a girl and her dog. Yes, based on the timing of its release it was tagged as a recession allegory, but it will be seen not as such later, rather as just a strongly felt character study in the style of its director. (And terribly relatable! At least to me. I had also a breakdown in a Honda! Though I was returning home from a job, not escaping to one. Still. That moment of FML, then there was a tow truck, followed for me by a lonely night in a cheap roadside motel off a highway in Eastern Massachussetts — really any INTERRUPTION of the presumed journey, the arc, or whatever you define it as, sucks. The feeling of being young, feeling independent, then being at mercy of these dumb factors beyond your control, a belt or an alternator or what have you, and how they jar one from their intended GOAL.)
So, basically, it manages to tug at the heartstrings in a very non-saccharine way. In the way of, well, this is life, isn’t it? The doing and the being and the choices and sacrifices, without the expected filmstrip bow tying everything neatly up at the end.
