Out of Frame: Wendy and Lucy
Director Kelly Reichardt's fourth feature, Wendy and Lucy, is a quiet affair. It takes place over the course of a couple of days in a little Oregon town. Its protagonist, Wendy, doesn't say much, as she spends most of her time alone, and occupies nearly every frame of the movie. And the film lacks a musical score of any sort, apart from a simple little offhand tune that Wendy hums absently to herself (written by Will Oldham, who also has a cameo). In other words, the movie sounds like life, long periods of silence with the little sounds of our environments and whatever music we bring with us.
And the pace of real life is the rhythm that drives Reichardt's film. There's only enough narrative here to fuel maybe 20 minutes worth of time in most films, but Reichardt stretches out the thin plot to show all that silent time in between things actually happening. It's a harder trick than it looks; let's face it, watching a person's life unfold without fast-forwarding to the important plot points is mind-numbing work, but credit Reichardt with being able to make such a beautifully minimalist film with so little explicitly stated.
What we know is that Wendy is on her way from her sister's place in Indiana to the promise of a new life in Alaska, armed only with a trunk full of possessions, a temperamental Honda Accord, and her beloved mutt Lucy. By the time she hits this depressed little Oregon burg, she's down to a little over $500 in cash, kept in a money belt fastened always around her torso.
It's a precarious position to be in, walking a financial tightrope with no real margin for error before you're suddenly busted. That Wendy had made it as far as she has is probably a surprise on its own; when car trouble strikes her one morning, it's enough to trigger a domino effect of mishaps (including the disappearance of her canine co-pilot) that begin to sabotage her entire plan. There's a grim inevitability to the way the 48 hours depicted in the film unspool. As anyone who has ever lived close to those thin margins on the edge of being flat broke can attest, the slightest thing going wrong can throw your entire life into disarray. It's the flipside to the romanticized vision of the itinerant free spirit, and Reichardt excels at finding the uncomfortable subtleties buried in that myth.
And with so little explicitly spelled out, subtlety is all Reichardt has to work with. Wendy and Lucy is a film built not on narrative and plot, but on nuance and suggestion. Tiny moments are tagged with great significance, as when Wendy calls back to her sister's house and asks to talk to her brother-in-law rather than her sister. When her sister gets on the line, we can see why, but an avalanche of questions and potential answers about what set Wendy on the road back there are brought up in a one minute phone call where no one really even says anything of much significance. Throughout the film, Michelle Williams is called upon to do that most difficult of acting tasks, to convey a constant interior monologue without words. She measures up admirably, matching Reichardt's subtlety with her own.
Reichardt laces the film with social commentary just as deftly. While filmed before the economy really took a nose dive, the town in which Wendy finds herself is as broken down as her Accord. There used to be a mill, but that closed down years ago, she's told by the old security guard at the Walgreens. "I don't know what the people do all day," he tells her. He's just happy to have any job at all, even if it's standing on his feet from eight to eight staring into space outside a drugstore. The mechanic at the closest service station seems to be somewhat sympathetic to her plight, but not so much that he's willing to give her much of a break on a towing fee to move her car 100 yards. Everyone in this town seems to be dealing with their own lives of quiet desperation, mired in their own problems; the moments of unalloyed altruism Wendy occasionally stumbles across are welcome respites from this bleak landscape.
And finally, there is the matter of the other half of the title. Lucy is an adorable "hunting dog/lab" mix, sure to bring a smile to your face anytime she's onscreen, and it's probably wise of Reichardt and co-screenwriter Jonathan Raymond (on whose short story, Train Choir, the film is based) to keep her off-screen for most of the movie. It's hard to tell such a bleak tale with such a happy-go-lucky presence around. Much of the story hinges on Wendy's search for Lucy, and some may see it as a cheap ploy to tug the heartstrings. Animals in the movies tend to automatically elicit more sympathy than most humans; watch any old western shoot-'em-up, and see if you don't feel more for the sad-eyed Appaloosa that takes a stray bullet rather than all the dudes in big hats falling to the ground. But Lucy never feels like a device; like everything else about Wendy and Lucy, what happens to this pair has the ring of truth, even if that truth isn't comforting or nearly as warm and fuzzy as she is. When Reichardt gets you to cry, those tears are well-earned. And when you leave the theater, the film's quiet tragedies will stay with you.
Opens today at E Street Cinema.