WENDY AND LUCY B+
USA (80 mi) 2008
d: Kelly Reichardt
And you may find
yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself - well…how did I get here?
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself - well…how did I get here?
—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980), Talking Heads - Once In A
Lifetime (Full Length Version ... YouTube (4:31)
Adapted from a short story Train Choir by the author Jon Raymond and the director, shot in the
vicinity of Portland, Oregon, where it is impossible not to reference local
filmmaker Gus van Sant when watching this film, as there are so many
similarities in minimalist style, such as the naturalism of the performances,
the flexible use of camera, an extraordinary offscreen sound design, and the adherence
to strict standards of realism and authenticity, including locale. While van Sant is receiving Oscar accolades
for his more mainstream release, a somewhat conventional biopic of Harvey Milk,
the first outwardly gay candidate to hold office in America, released
immediately after the crushing defeat of Proposition 8 in California which now
makes same sex marriage illegal, but his real standout film of the year was the
lesser known Paranoid
Park (2007), an oblique, fractured mosaic about a moody, self-absorbed
teenager whose world is turned upside down by a horrible incident that plays
out in his mind, none of which actually get at the truth of what happened,
displaying an inventive editing scheme, mired in the foggy incoherence that is
adolescent confusion. This film
similarly avoids the details of exploring what happens, but explores the
incoherence and confusion as it focuses on the fluctuating powerlessness in the
main character’s state of mind, much of it no doubt due to her own her own poor
decisions, but also impacted by a downward trend nationwide into dire economic
circumstances. While there are many road
movies similar to this, where Five
Easy Pieces (1970) comes to mind, especially at the end, most all have male
leads and none are as pared down as this one.
Michelle Williams plays Wendy, a young woman out on her own
with little to show for it, having no one to turn to except the companionship
of her dog Lucy (which happens to be Reichardt’s own dog — also featured in Old Joy). While not altogether homeless, Wendy is not far
from it, living a bleak existence that includes the hopes of traveling from
Muncie, Indiana to Ketchikan, Alaska where she believes she can find work in a
fish hatchery. Little is ever known
about her past or her future, or why she needs to get to Alaska, but she finds
herself stuck in Oregon, her car broken down, little money left, and is
continuously mired in the constant struggle of getting through the
present. While the film hasn’t an ounce
of artificiality and is a realist drama to the core, it lacks the complex sense
of artistic exploration and poetic originality of Paranoid
Park or the backdrop of the 60’s counterculture in her previous work Old Joy
(2006). Instead it portrays a fall from
grace, choosing to reduce minimalism even further, testing the audience’s
limits by showing less and less, so that in the end it is close to being
narrative free, becoming a tone poem capturing the quiet desperation and the
subtle nuances and textures of a marginalized life.
While it’s interesting that this film was made before the
stock market recently took a tumble a month or so before the November 2008
Presidential elections resulting in literally millions of people losing their jobs,
this film, like van Sant’s MILK (2008), couldn’t be more timely, as it shows
how easy it is to fall between the cracks, to lose everything, and to find
yourself scraping bottom.
And you may ask
yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask
yourself
Where is that large
automobile?
And you may tell
yourself
This is not my
beautiful house!
And you may tell
yourself
This is not my
beautiful wife!
—Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)
Written by David Byrne and Brian Eno, this song (though not
in the film) comes to mind as an existential anthem to that moment in
everyone’s life when they realize that youthful ideals and dreams can’t pay the
rent, replaced by unrecognizable yet more practical values like family,
security and responsibility. Still discovering
herself, Wendy is swallowed up whole by the unforeseen circumstances that she
allows herself to experience, having little or no defenses, as she values her
individuality and believes in that great American myth that life is better
somewhere else down the road.
Reminiscent of the uncompromising, harsh realities expressed in Lodge
Kerrigan’s lower class mental health film KEANE (2004), much of this resembles
the caged animal pacing that was the stark feature in the Dardennes brother’s
film ROSETTA (1999), as despite all the effort Wendy is making just getting
from place to place, she’s not getting anywhere, stuck in the quagmire of her
own helpless futility where she finds herself increasingly lost and alone. Released the same year as the completely
unexpected and devastating death of Williams’ husband Heath Ledger, there is an
acute feeling of sympathy and anguish associated with Williams’s
performance.
Sadness pervades nearly every frame of this film, as instead
of discovering more opportunities on the road, she’s faced with the ever
decreasing prospect of finding even fewer, where the vast open spaces that she
believes lie ahead cave in on her, leaving her lost in the tightening emotional
and economic stranglehold of being homeless and broke, still believing against
all odds that blue skies lie ahead. When
traveling on the road, one learns early on to expect the unexpected. Wendy hasn’t even reached that point yet, as
she’s still close to the beginning of her journey where she’s still stripping
herself of all earthly possessions. Shot
mostly out in the elements, this is a bleak portrait of naiveté, of
stubbornness and dead ends, of quiet hope and a yearning for something better
to materialize out of thin air. Call it
God, call it Alaska, sometimes one needs more than blind faith, yet it’s an apt
moral comment on our contemporary society by looking at one life on the edge of
economic ruin, where the predominate feeling is that of hopelessness and utter
despair, yet people avert their eyes and just walk in the other direction,
expecting people to fend for themselves, where any sense of what was once a
frontier community in the American West has all but been shattered to
pieces.
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