Michelle Williams and Lucy:
Beyond this, though, we're not shown anything by way of a backstory. Our view of events is limited to just a few days, and when Wendy visits the local pound in search of Lucy, a steady tracking shot of all the other lost dogs remind is of the millions more Wendys in small towns across America. Indeed, though it doesn't lean on a particular ideology, this is a fiercely political film in which the stakes of politics are the everyday lived experience: dollar bills exchanged between hands, a blank form waiting to be filled, or the aisle of a supermarket where shoppers do metal arithmetic to figure out what they can go without this week.
Wendy and Lucy lays bare the reality that poverty is a condition of circumstance rather than character, and that empathy, backed by a degree of outrage, is the only appropriate response.
—Joe Blackledge (read the entire essay here)
What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy—and to Lucy—matters a lot, which is to say that "Wendy and Lucy," for all its modesty, matters a lot too.
—A.O. Scott (read the review here)
Williams’s reading of the Wendy character, together with Reichardt’s appropriation of the muted tropes of melodramatic film discourse, combine to produce a rather unique sensation while watching Wendy and Lucy. I would wager that most viewers not only identify with Wendy but also feel unusually susceptible to registering her own vulnerabilities on our own spectatorial psyches, even down to our bodies. From the scene in the supermarket manager’s office, where we fidget along with Wendy, to the highly theatrical night sequence in the woods with the unnamed homeless man (Larry Fessenden), Wendy and Lucy activates Wendy’s body as one under threat, and whose threat we in turn feel by proxy. However, unlike many other sites of spectatorial identification, such as horror cinema or pornography, Reichardt’s film articulates these moments within a realist/materialist melodrama whose leftist aims are explicit. Every inch of the way, Wendy and Lucy displays how a chain of events leads Wendy to what is eventually, in her eyes, the best choice out of not very many: to leave Lucy behind in Oregon with the foster family that took her in. This moment, a classic tearjerker that has been compared, for good and ill, to everything from Umberto D. (1952) to Old Yeller (1957), seals the deal, in a sense, for Reichardt’s affective politics. Wendy, a young drifter with limited options, hit the skids one day and lost her dog. As we cry, Wendy and Lucy implicitly asks us to consider the unseen toll of poverty in America.
—Michael Sicinski (read the review here)
Kelly Reichardt making Wendy and Lucy:
I’m interested in making personal films and to me every film is political. There’s political in the personal. A lot of it has to do with Jon Raymond, my writing partner. I got turned on to him through Todd Haynes, who has produced these films. I read his novel and he has this way of writing where you’re reading about friendship and then it only occurs to you afterward that this is about everything. It’s about right now, this period of time, this moment. It has this ripple effect and it has a lot of room for you, as you’re reading, to bring your own life experience, your own point of view to it. So with Wendy and Lucy we start out with this idea that the film’s going to be about economics, about this time in America, but then that has to hopefully go away and it becomes about this girl Wendy, about these characters, and we never really focus on it again. I focus on it when I’m picking a place to shoot. Those decisions add texture to the themes, but certainly Michelle and I never had a conversation about the politics of whatever. It was all about Wendy and what would Wendy do, and hopefully all of that stuff gets pushed away. It either transcends or it doesn’t.
—Kelly Reichardt
The trailer for Wendy and Lucy:
"You can't get a job without a job."
—The Security Guard
The reaction by 5th period to Wendy and Lucy was pretty muted. As Zoya asked: "So...why?" And Isaac saw the realism—hyper realism really—as preventing him from relating to the film and Wendy. Everybody loved Lucy. Just admit it.
As I said in class, it was lauded highly—read the reviews above—and panned. I never demand you like a movie we watch. In fact, I think it's important that you not like everything we watch—and be able to explain why beyond "I don't usually watch this kind of movie" or "the costumes bored me." To think of what you like or dislike based upon what we see in the film itself, no matter what genre or whether it's foreign or domestic or black and white or color or recent or old. Wendy and Lucy, I think, is a deliberately difficult movie—because art does not have to be easy. Or should not always be easy. Carlin talked about how disconcerting Wendy's whistling was at the beginning of the film, and I have to agree; it may have been Carlin—or Lila or someone else—said it made the film seem like a horror film. And Kiran said from the floor, "It is." I think it's a beautiful movie; I know my mind drifts when I watch it. I wouldn't be surprised if Reichardt wanted that to happen.
1. What moment, scene, or image has stayed with you between seeing the film and writing this? And why is that?
2. I've been thinking about what Isaac said in 5th period block today—and talking later with Kiran about the movie got me thinking even more about what Isaac said in class. Isaac disagrees with Sicinski above, and many of you do too: you didn't relate to Wendy. If you don't "relate" to Wendy, why is that? If you do "relate" to Wendy, why is that?
Wendy presents us a character, as I said to Kiran, not all that different than Maggie in Million Dollar Baby—working class, not educated as much as certainly all of us in this class, not terribly sophisticated. But in the guise of Wendy, we realize how much Clint Eastwood smoothed the edges of his working class—or maybe really underclass—woman. Reichardt does not smooth the edges in that way: Wendy is not proud like Maggie, not spunky like Wadjda, not self-reflective nor artistic like Alike. She's a mystery. She's a little strange. That said, if you do not relate to Wendy, is that more about you than it is about the character of Wendy, or is that Wendy just is too...something different for you to make a connection with?
3. Reichardt and Jon Raymond worked closely together on the film: more so than Million Dollar Baby, Wendy and Lucy follows its source story almost verbatim. Pick a moment in the story that you felt the film presented well. Quote from the story and write about how the film captures it well. Everyone has to do a different moment: no repeating!
That's enough for this post. 250-300 words.
Finally: Wendy and the older Security Guard (Walter Dalton). They manage to create a relationship; and keeping with the film, what seems to start as a classic adversarial situation becomes something else. There is no bad guy in the film. Creepy and scary, yes, but not bad. Who or what the antagonist is we'll discuss.
