The Screengrab : will oldham

Even Walgreen's Seems Romantic: Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:45:00 GMT

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?"

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Screengrab Review: "Wendy and Lucy"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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.

Take Five: Labor Day

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Usually, the Screengrab's Take Five feature is inspired by some new release coming out the day we go to press. However, sometimes, if the raft of new releases in relatively uninspiring or inappropriate, we go with a different sort of them, and since today is the start of Labor Day weekend, what better time to salute organized labor? After all, some of us are union men ourselves (hey, the National Writer's Union is too a real union! We're part of the United Auto Workers for some reason!); and what with the writer's strike earlier this year that brought the movie business to a near-halt, and the possibility of an actor's strike later in the year coming along to finish what the writer's strike started, America hasn't been this aware of what organized labor is up to in years! Unfortunately, unless Vin Diesel's mercenary Thoorop in Babylon A.D. happens to be a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Hired Killers & Machinegun Operators, there's no new released this holiday weekend that are even remotely about unions or the labor struggle. But that doesn't mean we can't dip back into our video vaults and come up with five fine flicks about working-class struggle for your Labor Day enjoyment. (And, as a special treat before you go back to work on Tuesday, take a few hours to watch Barbara Kopple's masterful Harlan County U.S.A., referenced in last week's Take Five.) Happy Labor Day, readers!

MATEWAN (1987)

Possibly John Sayles' finest film, Matewan depicts -- with the heart of a union man and the eye of an artist -- the brutal struggle to unionize among the West Virginia coal miners of the 1920s, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of organized labor. Based on the Matewan Massacre of 1920 and featuring breathtaking cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan' s powerful story is bouyed by wall-to-wall terrific performances by Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, and a young Will Oldham, in his pre-rock star days. Essential.

NORMA RAE (1979)

Martin Ritt's feel-good hit about a scrappy female textile worker who takes on the burden of being the point woman for unionizing the clothing mill in the deep South that employs her hasn't held up particularly well -- it's got a handful of good performances (and won star Sally Field an Oscar), but at times it comes across as a bit hokey. But it still stands as a testament to one of the last flashes of union glory in the U.S. before Ronald Reagan's Republicans started their unrelenting war against organized labor in America. Worth watching as a document of its day.

ROGER & ME (1989)

Sure, nowadays, it's pretty easy even for liberals to make fun of Michael Moore. His insistence on making himself part of his stories has gotten out of hand, and in many ways, he's become the caricature lefty the right has always accused him of being. But in 1989, when he launched his quixotic quest to have just a few words with General Motors CEO Roger Smith and ask him to look at the massive devastation wrought by his moving manufacturing jobs out of Flint, MI to avoid union costs, he seemed like a true breath of fresh air and a voice for the voiceless.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940)

It's almost impossible now to overestimate the impact of John Steinbeck's finest novel and the stirring masterpiece of a film that John Ford made of it. With the sting of the Depression fresh in the minds of millions of viewers -- and with labor conflicts so intense that big agricultural interests in California sought to have the movie banned, just as they removed copies of the book from California libraries -- the gorgeous, moving film was no stolid classic then, but an urgent cry for justice and decency at a time when the country was in its direst of straits.

AMERICAN DREAM (1990)

By the time Barbara Kopple finished her disturbing, heartbreaking documentary about a strike by meat packers at the Austin, MN Hormel plant, Reaganism's determination to crush unions wherever they could be found had already made its tragic story about the slow, tangled dismantling and destruction of a labor negotiating unit a familiar one all over the country. A far more ambiguous work than her Harlan County U.S.A., American Dream nonetheless shows the unremitting sadness of the direction our country took when it allowed ideologues to launch an assault on the hard-won gains of the working class.