Review of Wendy and Lucy (2008) by Citizen S — 02 Feb 2009

Wendy is a young woman without a lot of money who's driving from Indiana to Alaska in a beat up old car. Lucy is her dog, a yellow mixed breed who's into chasing sticks.

We never really learn what prompted Wendy to embark on this poorly-budgeted journey other than what we can glean from a phone call to her married sister with whom she's recently lived. "What does [i]she[/i] want?" asks the sister when her husband tells her who's calling.

What she wants is money, but after hearing her sister's reaction to her call, Wendy doesn't even bother to ask, despite her dire financial situation. You see, her car, which doubles as her hotel room, has just broken down in a Walgreen's parking lot in Oregon. And even worse, Lucy just ran out of kibble.

Wendy tries to solve her financial crisis by shoplifting a few cans of dog food from the local supermarket. Unfortunately, she gets caught and a young hardass store clerk insists that the authorities be called. As she's being driven away in the squad car, sitting emotionless in the back seat, Wendy suddenly pipes up and tells the cops that her dog is tied up in front of the store. They basically ignore her. Many hours later, after she's been fingerprinted twice and she's paid a fine and taken a bus back from the police station to the supermarket, wouldn't you know it, Lucy is missing.

Even before this happened, I was pretty nervous when Wendy left Lucy tied outside while she washed up in a gas station restroom or shopped for groceries. I have a dog of my own, you see, and though I do tie him up on occasion while I run into a store, the operative word is "run". Sometimes I even pay the homeless guys who stand outside hawking papers to watch him for me.

Wendy, on the other hand, dawdles. She peruses. She stops to read gossip magazines. She doesn't seem to be the least bit concerned that someone might run off with her dog. And though we aren't privy to what happens between the time the cops are called and when Wendy's being driven away in the back of the squad car, it seems apparent that it never occurred to her to tell them about poor tethered Lucy until the very last minute.

Wendy is truly a girl of few words. When she's in the company of others, she rarely speaks; she mostly just observes. And when she's alone, she just keeps humming the same few unrecognizable notes over and over. The only time she seems really at ease is when she's playing with Lucy, and now her beloved Lucy has disappeared.

Her only friend in the world is this older Walgreen's security guard who takes pity on her after helping her push her illegally parked car out of the lot. He's a bit down on his luck himself but he helps her out with directions to the pound and lets her use his cell phone number on her "Lost Dog" flyers.

But all in all, it's still a pretty somber movie. The only happy character in the whole film is Lucy, and once she goes missing it's a veritable gloom-fest. The actress who plays Wendy is so convincing as a down-on-her-luck taciturn mope that I thought maybe the director plucked her straight from a homeless shelter. Turns out she's actually Michelle Williams, a quite-famous actress who apparently was Heath Ledger's fiance and is the mother of his child.

Who knew? Probably everyone but me, though I do make it a point of trying to improve my celebrity gossip IQ by reading "Star Magazine" every single time I get my hair cut. I now know the names of almost all of Angelina and Brad's children. Let's see...there's Pax, Zahara, Maddox...uh...Xanax...Pez... Well, I'm getting there, anyway.

I'm a big fan of slice-of-boring-life movies, but this one is really kind of hard to watch. It made me want to run home and hug my own little dog, who I'm happy to report was still safe and sound and as ecstatic to see me as ever. And no doubt grateful for the extra milky bones.