Michelle Williams Stars in an Arty, but Accessible Film
You can tell Wendy and Lucy (2008) isn't going to be an ordinary movie from the very first shot. It just shows a railroad yard with a train lumbering through, but it's moody and arresting. Already you can see that filmmaker Kelly Reichardt knows how to treat banal subjects poetically.
Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) gives a superb performance in the role of Wendy, the protagonist in this spare indie drama that was well received at festivals and made several best-of-2008 lists, but got only a limited theatrical release. We meet Wendy, a young adult with little money, on the road in her 1988 Honda, her only companion her retriever Lucy. Wendy is moving from Indiana to Alaska with the idea of getting a job in a fish cannery there. But in a nondescript Oregon town, her car breaks down and Lucy goes missing.
The movie captures aspects of 21st-century American life most of us would rather not think about: a man in a wheelchair waiting to get a few dollars recycling cans, a mentally ill homeless man, an elderly man working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. as a security guard, a pound filled with lovable abandoned dogs, and a high school boy with a job at a supermarket who seems to place no value on compassion. But no one treats Wendy unfairly, and at least one character is very kind to her.
The strength of Wendy and Lucy is in character, setting and mood, but there is a reasonable amount of narrative drive and dramatic tension. The ending is emotionally powerful, but don't expect Hollywood-style redemption. But Wendy's spirit isn't broken and her future still holds possibilities.
Five Short Avant-Garde Films by Four Different Filmmakers
The Wendy and Lucy DVD supplies no bonus materials directly related to the feature film, but there are some extras. Kelly Reichardt teaches at Bard College, and her movies come out of the tradition of American avant-garde cinema. This provides a rationale for including on the DVD five short films that use experimental approaches to the moving image. Four of the five are black-and-white art films, while the fifth is in color and primarily pedagogical. The total runtime of the shorts is about an hour.
Perhaps the most interesting of the artistic shorts is "New York Portrait #2," a soundless film that shows a series of New York City views using painterly compositions. "Boston Fire" is another soundless short, and in this one the filmmaker shot and edited striking images of billowing smoke. "The Scary Movie" gets old quickly as it depicts two young girls parodying horror movie scenes while spooky sounds and music fragments play on the soundtrack. "Flight" has annoying visuals and irritating sounds as it shows a "stuttering electronic motion study from footage of an American moon landing."
"How to Fix the World" is completely different from the other shorts in both style and content. A color animated talkie, it illustrates how culture affects the higher mental functions. It's adapted from Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria's Cognitive Development: Its Social and Cultural Foundations (1931), and the visuals are based on photos of peasants taken in Uzbekistan circa the 1930s. This may sound dry, but actually the film covers big ideas worth knowing in a lively, amusing way.
DVD Details
Below I have listed all the details for the DVD containing Wendy and Lucy.
Release Date: May 5, 2009
Feature Film Runtime: 1 hour 20 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Language
Widescreen (1.78:1), Color
English 5.1 Dolby Surround
English Dolby Stereo
English Subtitles
Short: "Boston Fire" by Peter Hutton (5 min.)
Short: "New York Portrait #2" by Peter Hutton (11 min.)
Short: "The Scary Movie" by Peggy Ahwesh (8 min.)
Short: "Flight" by Les LeVeque (7 min.)
Short: "How to Fix the World" by Jacqueline Goss (28 min.)
