As you'll learn from my annual top ten list, coming soon to this very spot, I am much enamored of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy. Formally, it's one of the simplest films I've seen all year, focusing as it does on a young female drifter passing through the Pacific Northwest with her beloved dog: but through its slow build, it manages to turn into a highly emotional thriller that blends elements of nostalgia, wistfulness, bitterness, anger and shame into one of the most arresting pieces of narrative in a good while. It's one of the few non-documentary films in recent American cinema with the courage to address economic issues in a way that's routinely done in foreign film, and it contains a number of quiet but very effective performances.
In an interview at IFC's website, director Kelly Reichardt -- who first came to my attention with the excellent Old Joy -- discusses the making of the film, the uncertaintly of bringing in a new cast, and how the idea for it came to be -- not so oddly, once you've seen it, the genesis of Wendy and Lucy was a number of conversations Reichardt had over various reactions to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. "These people, living in such peril, they wouldn't be in the the shape they're in, the position they're in," she says of the responses of many Americans to the misfortune of New Orleans' poor. "If you don't have a net and you've had a shitty education and you don't have the benefit of family that's in any better situation than you're in, how does one improve their lot? Not even reaching the middle class, but how do you just get a toehold in the next level? That was the seed."
For all her high-minded purposes and her intelligence as a filmmaker, Reichardt also seems keenly aware of the possibility that using a sentimental girl-and-her-dog story as the medium for her message always bore a risk of coming across as mawkish. It's a fear that hasn't quelled even though Wendy and Lucy has become one of the best-reviewed movies of the year: "We were scared about that the whole time," she says of the pitfalls of sentimentality. "Still. What's not to be afraid of with that?"
Related Posts:
Screengrab Review: Wendy and Lucy
Paul Clark Previews TIFF '08
