Review of Wendy and Lucy (2008) by Jackie T — 23 May 2009

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy embodies everything that most people fear when they hear a film referred to as "independent". It was borne of the philosophy that a good movie requires little to no plot (plot is the enemy!), in favor of long scenes of people walking or sitting or else doing nothing at all. Why? Because those sorts of activities are realistic! And realism is the name of the game in the world of indie drama, where the truth of the story is measured in how little dialogue and/or camera movement there is. If you're making an independent film, the less your main character speaks and the plainer your locations, the better chance you have of becoming a star.

Oh, there's a sort of a story. It's about a woman named Wendy (Michelle Williams) who is traveling to the mythic land of Alaska, because it represents some sort of ethereal Paradise for her where everybody is happy all the time and nobody ever has to worry about anything. She is going there with her best friend, a dog named Lucy. She keeps careful track of her finances in a little notebook and lives out of her car. When Wendy and Lucy get to Oregon, though, their car breaks down. Uh oh. Then, when Wendy tries to steal some food from the local grocery store, the employees of said grocery store act in an entirely unreasonable and unrealistic way - by dragging her into their back office and calling the police to come take her away. The police, similarly, act like no police officers ever would, by ignoring completely her pleas to retrieve her dog from the front of the store. Thus, after Wendy's series of unfortunately unbelievable events, she returns to the store to find that Lucy has vanished.

So the rest of the movie is about Wendy running around trying to find Lucy. Or it's about the economy. In any case, Lucy walks around the town looking for her lost dog for the rest of the movie. She does take some time to go to a mechanic's shop to get her car looked at. The mechanic tells her that she may have to purchase a new timing belt, an obvious metaphor for the federal defecit. She goes to Walgreen's and talks to the superfluous security guard there (since when do Walgreen's stores have security guards stationed outside?). She goes to the pound to see if her dog has been found. She walks around. She goes back to Walgreen's. She sleeps in her car. She walks around.

This is realistic, man! No contrivances of "plot"... well, except for the contrivances of the police encounter which got the dog lost in the first place. But I mean, after that, we don't have to worry about any sort of structure. How unwieldy a thing is a story, anyway? What's more important is to show people just being, even if they're being mostly boring. Or else, um, it's about the recession. Yeah. But by throwing off the heavy iron shackles of storylines, we are able to see a pure performance. We get to watch Michelle Williams acting for an hour and twenty minutes, just ACTING. Isn't the mere fact of acting enough? Isn't that what movies are all about - just existing?

It is possible to make a movie with a small, contained story. It's great to make a movie that is driven by the character more than the coincedences of the plot. It is admirable to make a movie simple, yet powerful. But Wendy and Lucy does none of these things well. It wants to be so meaningful with its simplicity, but fails entirely.

There are better movies than this.