Wendy And Lucy

If you begin at Star Trek, then turn one hundred eighty degrees and start to march, you will wind up eventually at Wendy And Lucy; and in the process of so doing, you will cover nearly the entire spectrum of the cinematic experience. Other than the concept that both are, in fact, movies, there is practically nothing that the two have in common. I don’t want to spend the whole time comparing and contrasting, though - because enough has been said about Star Trek, while I imagine probably very little has been said about Wendy And Lucy.

It’s a very straightforward story about a woman called Wendy who is making her way across the country from Muncie, Indiana, to the west coast, with designs on getting up to Alaska, where she has heard there is good work to be found at a cannery (and if you think that this seems vaguely to echo The Grapes Of Wrath, I agree with you). She has brought with her on the trip a very few belongings, a few hundred dollars she has socked away, and her dog, Lucy; and when her aging Honda breaks down somewhere in Oregon, you don’t exactly get the idea that she was expecting smooth sailing from beginning to end on this trip.

And now I’m conflicted about where to go with this. If I give too much away, or tell you so much about the plot that you decide you don’t want to see the movie, what purpose will I have served? This review should really be just two sentences long, with the first sentence expressing that idea that I liked Wendy And Lucy so much that I have to go back and re-evaluate my 2008 top ten list to account for it; and the second sentence should simply be an imperative directing you, the reader, to Netflix Wendy And Lucy immediately.

Okay...now that I’ve said that, read on only if you want to find out nearly everything that happens. See, the thing is that not a whole lot happens in this movie; but most of the things that do happen have impact - as opposed, say, to Spock and Uhura in the turbolift, which is vaguely amusing but serves no real purpose - and to say that Michelle Williams did a tremendous job with this role without also saying a little bit about how she did such a good job with the role is just unfair.

After the car breaks down, the Walgreen’s security guard tells Wendy that she has to move the car off of the drug store lot - and then he helps her push it to a parking spot on the street and tells her where she can find a nearby grocery store. Williams does it all with her eyes, making no attempt to disguise her weariness at yet another thing that has gone wrong. In one of the few clumsy scenes in the film, she is detained for shoplifting at the grocery store and subsequently arrested. When she finally returns to the grocery store, her beloved dog, which Wendy had tied to a bike rack (“Do you know what the penalty for animal cruelty is in this state?” “No sir, I don’t.” “Well...it’s probably pretty stiff.”), has vanished.

Lucy is pretty much the only thing going right for Wendy, the only positive constant in her life at this point - and so the clumsiness in this scene is derived from how seemingly easily Lucy is lost. Is it possible that this could play out the way it’s depicted? Sure it is...but when you consider how carefully Wendy pays attention to all of the other little details, you have to wonder that she could slip so dreadfully on this biggest detail. That said, though, the story turns on Lucy’s being lost, so it had to be accomplished in some fashion - and it’s certainly less obtrusive a contrivance than, say, arbitrarily creating a time-travel loop in order to relieve yourself of the burden of having to pay attention to the continuity in one previous television series and six previous films.

Wendy spends the rest of the film accomplishing two things - getting her car to a repair shop and finding her dog. And you know what? Now that we get down to it...I don’t have the heart to tell you what happens. It’s so simple...but so powerful...you just have to watch it for yourself. Besides, Ryan and Troy already know what happened, and how many of the rest of you are actually going to watch this picture? (I hope, of course, that all of you will, and that you will tell others about it.)
What’s really great about this movie is that director Kelly Reichardt basically just lets the camera roll, steps aside, and lets us watch what happens to Wendy, lets us see how Wendy observes the world and interacts with it and with the people that she meets along the way. Reichardt doesn’t really employ either foreshadowing or misdirection, but that final scene with Wendy and Lucy still manages to sneak up on you and sort of take your breath away. For all of its bells and whistles, all of the things it manages to do right while going against the grain of the crappy type of movie that it is, Star Trek doesn’t even come to close to evoking the kind of emotional response that you get at the end of Wendy And Lucy.

Go from here, reader, and Netflix Wendy And Lucy immediately. And, if you’re interested, you can read an article about Wiliams and this picture, from a several-months-ago issue of Newsweek, here.