Where's Lucy

Wendy spends most of Wendy and Lucy tottering on the very edge of the border that separates merely being broke from dropping out of society. Her car has broken down in a small town somewhere in Oregon (she’s driving to Alaska as part of a fuzzy plan to restart her life in a new location); she has about $500 to her name, not enough for even a cheap motel; and when she gets hauled off to the police station for shoplifting a can of dog food and a couple of pieces of fruit, she returns to the store hours later to find that her dog Lucy has disappeared from where she tied him up. The only person who helps her is an older guy, a security guard at the Walgreen’s where her car is parked, who lets her borrow her cellphone to keep in touch with the pound. During their final conversation, he presses a few crumpled bills into her hand. “Don’t argue,” he says. “Just take it.” It looks like there’s maybe $12 in there. That’s probably more than he could spare — but gee whiz. That’s not much.

Wendy and Lucy is a film about human limitations, about people not quite able to get by or do enough to help the people (and animals) around them. It’s the spiritual opposite, then, of something like Seven Pounds, and it’s to director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt’s credit that the film never seems as if she’s imposing some kind of pessimistic worldview upon the material. It’s one of the most in-the-moment films of the year: we get no backstory for Wendy, no indication of what inspired this car trip, no information about her education level, her sexuality, her cultural tastes. We simply watch as Wendy deals, step by step, with her situation and make our conclusions about her character that way, as she sneaks sinkbaths in the women’s room of a nearby gas station or yells ineffectually at the teenaged prick at the supermarket who got her arrested or spends a chunk of her precious savings to put up some “lost dog” posters around the neighbourhood. She even scatters her clothes in a few key locations — clothes she surely can’t afford to lose — in the hope that Lucy will be lured back by the scent.

At a certain point in the film, Wendy even winds up sleeping under a blanket in the forest, and when a crazy man discovers her there, Reichardt keeps her camera tight on Wendy’s frozen, terrified eyes as the man delivers an incomprehensible, angry rant and she tries to figure out if he’ll finish it off by killing her or merely raping her. There are great actors who always seem aware that an audience is watching them (Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Kevin Spacey), and then there are actors who barely seem to realize there’s even a camera pointed at them — Michelle Williams gives one of the second category of performances with her work here as Wendy. With her hair dark and cut short, wearing a cheap blue hoodie, brown shorts, and a mysterious, dirty-looking bandage on one ankle, she’s definitely deglamourized herself, but not in a way that calls the least bit of attention to itself. She merely looks ordinary — a young woman with enough spunk to set out on her own to look for work in Alaska, but naïve and desperate enough to make the trip in an ill-equipped car and maybe one-fourth the proper budget.

Williams’ performance is free of histrionics, or appeals for pity from the audience, or seemingly any fancy tricks or affectations whatsoever, and yet the final 10 minutes of the film, in which Wendy confronts the hopelessness of her situation, are as devastating as anything I’ve seen in a film this year. Just looking at the image at the top of this review, of Williams looking through the fence, on the verge of becoming a different type of person than she was just four days ago, makes my eyes fill up with tears.

Of all the great films that came out in 2008, Wendy and Lucy may be the simplest. It’s so simple, in fact — barely 80 minutes long — that it almost seems like anyone could have made it, like there’s no trick to it at all. And yet in practice, hardly anybody does. What’s Reichardt’s secret? Does she even know? Or does she simply do what Wendy does: deposit herself in a strange location and walk around searching for something, hoping she’ll find what she wants before her money runs out?