Kelly Reichardt, the director of Old Joy (2006) and the new Wendy and Lucy, deserves a lot of credit for politically aware movies that deal with people who live on the margins of society and aren't usually represented even in indie films, and she does get a lot of credit. Old Joy was no blockbuster, but it was probably one of the best reviewed movies of the last few years. That film starred Daniel London as a married man with a pregnant wife and Will Oldham as his longtime buddy, whose unsettled lifestyle, part bohemian and part derelict, has started looking less romantic as the two of them head into the mid-thirties. The bulk of the movie depicts what will likely be the last of a series of camping trips that the two men have gone on over the course of their friendship; it's not just that the two are growing apart but that the possibilities life once offered them have begun to shut down. London's character is about to face the responsibilities of fatherhood, while Oldman, who has the look and manner of a balding hippie burnout, may be on the verge of homelessness and drug addiction. Lest the viewer mistake these guys as just two sad cases instead of representatives of a diminished age, the soundtrack is monopolized by Air America talk-radio broadcasts that come pouring in through the family man's car radio, one sad dispatch after another about the sorry state of things in the extended lame-duck phase of the Bush era. Old Joy was first shown midway through Bush's second term, in the spring and summer before the 2006 midterm elections, and the gratitude that it inspired in many people has to be a response to the way it seemed to reflect the mood of melancholy hopelessness that a lot of people felt after Bush's re-election and the widespread feeling that the country was turning into a train wreck with nobody at the controls. (Reichardt has said that the movie is about "a point when anger turns to ruefulness.") Wendy and Lucy, which aims to capture a similar tone of poeticized depressiveness, (and which, like Old Joy, is based on a story by Reichardt's co-writer Jonathan Raymond) is being dropped into a much-changed political climate, yet it feels almost as lucky in its timing. It ties into current economic fears and the question that many people must be entertaining these days: if the very worst happened to you, just how bad could that get?

Michelle Williams plays Wendy, who's traveling to Alaska, with her dog Lucy, in hopes of finding work there when her car breaks down in Oregon. Without a means of transportation, Wendy is stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no friends and no family she can turn to; her sister, who she tries to phone, has her own mouths to feed and her own problems to deal with. Shot down in mid-flight, she has no resources beyond the meager wad of cash she's been carefully rationing out and no way to build on what she has. As the security guard who's the closest thing she has to a support network puts it, you can't get a job if you don't have an address, but you need the job if you're ever going to get an address. This situation would be bad enough if Wendy only had herself to worry about, but her freedom to move is limited by her responsibility to Lucy, a beautiful big dog with expressive eyes. When Wendy is caught trying to shoplift dog food from a grocery store, the cops haul her off, leaving Lucy tied to a post in the parking lot. By the time Wendy is released and returns to the store, Lucy is gone, and nobody knows where she went.

It's hard to say who's the stronger potential tearjerker object here, the dog or Michelle Williams. A fine actress who's demonstrated a range and a degree of daring that belie her moppet-next-door looks, Williams gives an honorable performance here, providing Wendy with a flinty, guarded shell and more than a hint of a chip on her shoulder. It's startling when you get to see her in a near-panic with no on around to act tough in front of, and her full defenseless and fear come out, as in a scene when she's had an (unspecified) encounter with a menacing figure (played by Larry Fessendon, who was one of the film's producers) in the park at night, and runs into a public restroom, wanting to wash the last several minutes off her skin. Williams is too honest to beg the audience for sympathy, but a plea for sympathy is pretty solidly lodged at this picture's core: how else could you react to it? Reichardt's minimalist storytelling and unglamorous filmmaking are worn as badges of artistic integrity and ideological purity, but it gets its emotional effects the same way as silent movies starring Rin Tin Tin. It's designed as a statement on the people who slip through society's cracks, but a the same time, it's still a movie about a waif who's been cruelly separated from her dog.

Just as religious conservatives are sometimes quick to react to movies that explore religious themes in ways that offend them of being blasphemous, knocking a movie like Wendy and Lucy for being unimaginative and sentimental and shameless can get you accused of complacency, of not being aware that there really are people in straits as desperate as those that Reichardt's heroine falls into. Reichardt's first feature, the 1994 River of Grass, which starred Fessendon and Lisa Bowman as a couple of Florida losers who make a half-hearted stab at being romantic outlaws, was also about people living on the margins, but it had humor and energy and some surprises to it. Compared to Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, it was a scrappy-looking picture, without the polished look and meditative longeurs of Reichardt's recent work. But it wasn't as one-note; it rewarded you for not nodding off during it, and it didn't spend most of its running time telegraphing its characters' hopelessness. (Incidentally, Old Joy was Reichardt's second full-length feature. I do wonder how much that phrase about "a point when anger turns to ruefulness" might actually refer to a point that you reach during the twelve years it takes you to get another feature made.) The only moment in Wendy and Lucy that recalls River of Grass comes early on, when Wendy comes across some other down-and-outers (including Will Oldham) sitting around a fire and acting friendly and companionable. For a minute, the movie suggests the we're-all-in-this-together spirit of old Depression-era movies where people down on their luck had some wit and pluck, but the way Reichardt hurries to chase these friendly interlopers out of the movie, it's as if she just wanted to make the point that there are people as hard up as Wendy all over, before leaving her heroine isolated and alone. Whether they were fiery protest melodramas like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or romances like A Man's Castle or sporty comedies, the best Hollywood Depression movies made audiences of all social and economic classes feel close to people living out hard luck stories by making them smart and funny and resourceful enough that viewers wanted to identify with them. Old Joy encouraged intelligent viewers to identify with that self-pitying part of themselves that made them want to feel that their best years were behind them and all hope was lost, and if you have the price of a ticket, Wendy and Lucy can only make you feel, "There but for the grace of God..." Letting your anger turn to rue can make for both ineffectual politics and dull movies.