To read Wendy and Lucy’s plot synopsis is to wonder how in the name of God a film could be constructed around such a slight premise (a young homeless woman loses her dog) – and, still yet, not just any film but one of the best American films of 2008. Director Kelly Reichardt is a Pacific Coast indie interested only in the minutest of dramas, unfurling in the most genuine of circumstances. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, was a masterpiece of unexpressed feelings and sublimated disappointment, and Wendy and Lucy is even better, finer, more mysterious and impactful, and so directly focused on its heroine’s plight in life that you sense it’d be an injustice to read her as a metaphor for the economically disenfranchised swarming under affluent America’s loud mouthed middle-class.
The film is so lean that the opportunity to interpret Wendy’s dilemma as a universalised statement is there for the taking, but Reichardt’s approach is stringently concrete. This is the reality of 99 per cent of United States communities: decaying infrastructure, Wal-Mart sustenance, gone-to-weed neighbourhoods, lives ruled by petty commerce. There’s not a fake moment or image on the programme, but we’re not quite talking about an Americanised take on the ascetic programme of Jia Zhangke or the Dardennes – Reichardt’s formal approach is less restricting, less self-conscious. She has room in her toolbox for conventional close ups and match cuts, and makes no show of extended takes. Even so, the intimacy we share with Michelle Williams’ lost girl is breathtaking, managed as it is simply by an attentive soundtrack (you remember the sound of her breath long afterwards), a camera placement strategy that somehow avoids all apparent agendas, and the actress’ formidable grip on her time and place and exactly how little emotion such a luckless woman would show the world in the worst of times. Williams has proven to be a faultless, often bruisingly naked actress, and here she is as completely submerged into a four-dimensional real person as any performer we’ve seen this decade. Which means, frankly, you could walk by her on the street and take no notice.
Reichardt’s close enough to her character that when Wendy’s car won’t start, in the centre of an Oregon Wal-Mart parking lot, it feels like the sky has begun to fall. The time spent in lock up, waiting with Wendy for the local law to turn its gears while her dog Lucy remains tied up to a bicycle rack, is agonising to a degree the makers of modem thrillers could only dream of. The mundanity of the story is equalled, and complemented by, its tragic whiplash, and though it’d be gauche to discuss the film’s delicate, unexpected, quietly heartbroken ending, we could say this: the experience of it comes close to a primal cinematic vibe, a sadness that reaches back to Chaplin, Rin Tin Tin, Our Gang’s Wheezer, and Ozu’s I Was Born, But… It’s even fair to say, from the most objective standpoint, that the movie tests the tensile strength of your own innate empathy, and if you are unmoved, the failure is yours. Which is, inevitably, overhype: Wendy and Lucy is too miniaturist, too conscientiously modest, too charitable really in the end to support such grand claims for it in the popular culture. Would that we were able to simply provide the experience of Reichardt’s film to every brainpan without the necessity of marketing or criticism – it’s exactly the kind of fundamental soak in humanness that movies were made to be, except by today’s standards it’s virtually an anti-movie, a sketch of a moment of a minor occurrence. It will be seen by a precious few, but it should be required viewing for all.
Michael Atkinson, Sight and Sound, February 2009
Wendy and Lucy
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt
©: Field Guide Films
Production Companies: Film Science, Glass Eye Pix
Presented by: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Executive Producers: Todd Haynes, Rajen Savjani, Phil Morrison, Joshua Blum
Produced by: Neil Kopp
Producers: Anish Savjani, Larry Fessenden
Production Supervisor: Jeffery P. Harding
Production Accountant: Brett Cranford
Production Co-ordinator: Katy Kolego
Location Manager: Roger Faires
Post-production Supervisor: Kyle Gilman
1st Assistant Director: Gabriel Fleming
Casting Director: Laura Rosenthal
Casting by: Simon Max Hill
Additional Casting: William Bailey
Screenplay by: Jon Raymond, Kelly Reichardt
From the story by: Jon Raymond
Director of Photography: Sam Levy
Additional Photography: Greg Schmitt
1st Assistant Camera: Tg Firestone
2nd Assistant Camera: Eliza Plumlee
Key Grip: Brian Shotzbarger
Gaffer: Efrem Peter
Still Photographer: Simon Max Hill
After Effects: Hive FX, Jim Clark
Editor: Kelly Reichardt
Assistant Editors: Andreas Fehrle, Abbi Jutkowitz, Mike Burchett
Production Designer: Ryan Smith
Lead Man: Nate Smith
Wardrobe Designer: Amanda Needham
Wardrobe Assistant: Jamie Hanson
Tattoo Artist: Amy Cole
Hair: David Kennedy
Title Design: PLAZM, Joshua Berger, Niko Courtelis
Film Labs: FotoKem
Video Dailies: FotoKem
Digital Intermediate Facility: Hollywood Intermediate, Inc
Digital Intermediate Colourist: Will Harris
Grocery Store Music: Smokey Hormel
Wendy Theme Music: Will Oldham
Sound Designers: Leslie Shatz, Eric Offin
Location Sound: Eric Hill
Additional Sound Recordist: Tyler Stephens
Rain Recordings: Reuben Cox
Re-recording Mixer: Leslie Shatz
Co Re-recording Mixer: Eric Offin
Re-recording Facility: Wildfire Studios
Sound Editor: Javier Bennassar
ADR Recordist: Mark Garcia
Foley Supervisor: Eli Cohn
Foley Artist: Brian Vancho
Cast
Michelle Williams (Wendy)
Walter Dalton (security guard)
Larry Fessenden (man in park)
Will Oldham (Icky)
John Robinson (Andy)
Will Patton (mechanic)
Lucy the dog (herself)
David Koppell, Max Clement, Sid Shanley, Dave Hubner (kids by fire)
Michelle Worthy (Sadie)
Roger Faires (recycler in wheelchair)
Boggs Johnson (recycling man)
Tanya Smith (grocery checker)
Michael Brophy (grocery store checker)
John Breen (Mr Hunt)
Deneb Catalan (male cop)
Skeeter Green (female cop)
Marilyn Hickey (police administrator)
Jeanine Jackson, Brenna Beardsley (grocery cashiers)
Winfield Jackson, Gabe Nevins, Connor O’Shea, Josh Larsen (teenagers by car)
Ayanna Berkshire (pound employee)
Dan Wilson (man on bus)
Greg Schmitt (mechanic in garage)
David Rives Curtright (man reading book)
Holly Cundiff (security guard’s woman)
James Yu (cab driver)
George Haapala (home owner)
Deirdre O’Connell (Deb, phone call voice)
M. Blash (Dan, phone call voice)
USA 2008©
80 mins
Digital
The screening on Wed 4 Mar will be introduced by writer and editor Laura Staab
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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