Movie Review – Wendy & Lucy
by practicalspactical
Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Old Joy, like that film co-written with novelist Jonathan Raymond and based on a short story he penned called “Train Choir.” What’s this movie about?
How hard it is in America. Being adrift and alone. The fragility of our social safety net. I read in an interview its impetus came from Katrina, and both the bungled aftermath and the desperate poverty of those who were failed during that seven-day trial — those who when told to leave realized they had no place to go and no way to get there.
We don’t know why Wendy is heading to Ketchikan, AK — I mean we do, to work, and her Indiana license plates on her 1988 Honda Accord imply a story of the rust belt, maybe — Ketchikan, AK, remember was the terminus of the bridge to nowhere — and so in an American that’s rusting away, a single girl, feminity abandoned, perhaps artfully so to protect her from the predators of the road (one of whom we meet in a chilling scene that must happen more than we realize, every day, in the real world), sets out, her solace her dog.
It is a sketch. Artful. Graceful. Sad and lonely. People try, but who knows what they do all day long — and Wendys realizes that even a dog is too much responsibility —
We sit there with Wendy, as she sleeps in a car, washes up in a gas station bathroom, gets caught shoplifting and arrested, loses her dog. Life is hard, the movie says. We know this, but we don’t know this — and while we are far from Wendy, the differences between her life and ours are minimal — maybe especially for me — but for a lot of us — drifting — one check away —
Six dollars, maybe seven, trade hands at one point in the movie. It is a telling moment.
The crust-punk neohobos of the Rusty 21st Century (America’s Autumn, they will call it) gathered round the fire, doing drugs, semi-dangerous.
The security guard outside Walgreens. The kid who turns Wendy in, with a little crucifix around her neck. Freight trains rolling by. The mighty trees of the Pacific Northwest. The little houses. The small town bus. America.
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees 