Wendy and Lucy (***)

Wendy is a young woman with a dog. She is passing through Oregon. She has $525, some old clothes, and not much else. Her plan is to drive to Alaska for work. But her car breaks down in some town off the interstate. First, she has to push her car out of a parking lot. The guard won’t let her park there. The service station isn’t open. Wendy and Lucy need food, so Wendy asks the guard where a market is. They begin to walk.

Reading the above paragraph will give you some feel of what this movie is like. I saw it compared to a distaff Into the Wild, maybe because of the character being alone and heading for Alaska, but that’s not exactly right. Chris McCandless is looking for solitude and the meaning of life. His story is existentialism writ large. Solitude has already found Wendy (for reasons of which we only get the barest glimpse), who is only looking for work. It is the viewer who may wonder about the meaning of life while watching this melancholy tale. It is existentialism writ small.

The movie shows only a few days in Wendy’s (Michelle Williams) life, and only takes up 80 minutes on screen, though it could have—perhaps should have—been even shorter. Kelly Reichardt, who directed the adaptation of Jonathan Raymond’s story “Old Joy,” adapts another Raymond story. As the author has noted, when novels get made into movies, they can feel crammed. With a short story, it feels like the movie instead elaborates the story. I can’t say I found it extremely moving or anything (maybe if I was a dog lover…), but there was something appealing in its artless simplicity. (There is not even a score.) Williams, who looks like a boy here, exactly fits the part of unassuming Wendy. I haven’t read Raymond’s stories, but a Raymond Carver story is what the movie seemed like, only more placid. It’s not for everybody, but you can probably tell if it’s for you.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/28/09