Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy – now released on Blu-Ray by Second Run – is a great film about animals, which is to say it’s a great film about people. Most films about the animal kingdom are sentimental, Disneyfied looks at nature, or at least ones that anthropomorphise their star beasts to some degree. Being honest about animals requires admitting we don’t know how they think and perceive the world, which makes them a bit of a challenge to relate to as lead actors. The films in which animals act most like animals are the ones which use them as a window onto humanity: Robert Bresson and Jerzy Skolimowski’s donkeys stoically encountering human venality, Samuel Fuller’s white dog learning and unlearning the racism of its owners, Werner Herzog’s indifferent grizzlies and mad penguins resisting any human attempt to understand them.
There’s also Flike, the dog in Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D., a neorealist classic which critics often cite as inspiration for Wendy and Lucy. It’s actually adapted from Jon Raymond’s short story ‘Train Choir’, with some additional input from Reichardt’s life. Lucy is played by (and named for) the director’s own dog, who proved so resistant to staying at home while her owner worked that Reichardt decided to make a film where there was a built-in excuse to bring her along every day. But it’s appropriate that the film reaches back into the history of the social realist genre. Reichardt is one of the few modern American film-makers who have repeatedly taken poverty as a subject. This film, released in the exact year that the subprime loan bubble caused a global recession, is her most committed, unflinching look at the topic.
Not that it’s a drag to watch. Unlike many modern social realist films, there is no speechifying or tub-thumping in Wendy and Lucy. You will be left in no doubt as to what Reichardt thinks about poverty – it’s bad, obviously – but this is demonstrated, not dictated. We simply observe Michelle Williams’s Wendy as she rolls up into a small town in Reichardt’s beloved Pacific Northwest with a specific, small amount of money. We then see that money dwindle to nothing as a series of crises beset her, each one putting another obstacle in the way of her extremely modest dream to go to Alaska and start working in a cannery. In her inlay booklet, critic Elena Gorfinkel notes that Reichardt’s two previous films had been road movies of different kinds, and part of the reason why it’s so easy to share Wendy’s frustration is that we want to be on that big open road with her.
It might be Reichardt’s best film, and she’s never made a bad one.
There are plenty of other reasons why we care for her, none more important than Michelle Williams’s performance. There’s a lot of fine actors in Wendy and Lucy; Will Patton is great as a mechanic who seems to enjoy talking to everyone except Wendy, and there are two notable cameos for the stars of Reichardt’s first two features. Old Joy‘s Will Oldham has a raucous early appearance as the kind of boxcar traveller who seems to have stepped out of the Great Depression – another link back to earlier cinematic depictions of poverty there – while River of Grass‘s Larry Fessenden chills as a very damaged man Wendy meets in a park. But there’s no doubt that it’s Williams’s movie. It wasn’t the first arthouse triumph for the one-time Dawson’s Creek star, who’d already been Oscar-nominated for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain at this point. But this is a challenging lead role, one where Williams is in every single scene of the film, and she responds with a completely self-assured, unshowy, naturalistic performance.
As it is with the lead role, so it is with the film. Too many social realist films assume that ugly subject matter requires ugly visuals, and Wendy and Lucy certainly isn’t one of those. Equally, it doesn’t aestheticise the situation, or distract from the urgent, straight-ahead nature of Reichardt and Raymond’s script. Cinematographer Sam Levy’s grainy, saturated 16mm imagery is perfectly captured in this director-approved 2K master: there is a shot of Wendy in her deep blue coat standing in front of some glowingly ripe fruit which made me catch my breath. But that is still just a shot of a woman in a supermarket, and a supermarket where she can’t afford to buy anything at that. Everything in Levy’s photography, Reichardt’s directing and Williams’s performance is laser-focused on telling the story, and in turn the story is laser-focused on truth.
It might be Reichardt’s best film, and she’s never made a bad one. The one thing that doesn’t seem to be under the director’s control is, inevitably, Lucy, a ball of delightful energy whose connection with Wendy is the emotional heart of the film. We feel sorry for Wendy when her money starts to run out through no fault of her own, but we feel, full stop, for Wendy when she’s separated from Lucy. Made for just £300,000 over twenty days, it is a pocket American epic, and richly deserves its place among the mostly older, non-English-language arthouse classics in Second Run’s back catalogue. The only extra, apart from the typically fine Second Run booklet mentioned above, is a half-hour conversation between writer So Mayer and film-maker Andrea Luka Zimmerman. They talk about Zimmerman’s own dog movie Taskafa: Stories of the Street, the politics of Reichardt’s film and the fraught year it was released in, and, of course, dogs, with the pair being joined on the sofa by Zimmerman’s gargantuan good boy Quinn.
WENDY AND LUCY IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
