Yarr! There be “spoilers” ahead.
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Shortly after learning that her car has broken down, stranding her in an anonymous small town in Oregon until she can get it repaired, the protagonist of Wendy and Lucy (2008) walks into a grocery store with the intention of shoplifting food for herself and her dog Lucy. This is obvious from the way she walks straight to these bins full of baked goods and, after a quick look around to make sure no one is watching, immediately slips something into her bag:
Upon being stopped after leaving the store, she reacts in a manner that suggests she thinks she has done nothing wrong, protesting that she has merely forgotten to pay and petulantly demanding that the young man who has accosted her “let go.” This young man has a cross hanging rather conspicuously from around his neck:
Right here, eighteen minutes into her eighty-minute-long film, director Kelly Reichardt lost me. Why is Wendy stealing food, I wondered, when it has been established that she has enough money to pay for it? And what’s with the cross? Is this supposed to be some sort of indictment of Christianity? I watched Wendy and Lucy for the first time in February at Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ Regent Square Theater and revisited it in May after it came out on DVD, but even after seeing it twice, I still couldn’t figure out what was up with this scene.
As Michael Sicinski notes in an article on the film in Cineaste Magazine, Wendy’s willingness to risk a potential $50 fine for a $2 can of dog food that she can easily afford is “in no way indicative of the meticulous, even obsessive budgeting that characterizes the lives of real working-poor individuals,” but rather characterizes the behavior of “middle-class university hippies for whom shoplifting is less a necessity than a semiotic event, certainly representing useful and sometimes even necessary savings but also signifying ‘fuck-the-man!’ rebellion and competitive sport” (as does her apparent sense of entitlement). Michelle Williams’ Wendy clearly isn’t supposed to be this latter sort of person, but the film readily supports such a reading through its refusal to provide an alternate explanation for how she came to be in this situation in the first place, and once you start to think of her that way, it’s awfully hard to understand her behavior in any other way than as (in Sicinski’s words) “a fissure within the very conception of the Wendy character, as well as the greater material circumstance she is meant to represent.”
Bad filmmaking, I thought, but that didn’t sit right: this was, after all, the fourth best film of the year. So I went looking for answers in “Train Choir,” the Jon Raymond short story that corresponds to the film (Raymond and Reichardt came up with the story together, and she started working on the screenplay for Wendy and Lucy before “Train Choir” was finished, so it’s not a simple case of one being adapted from the other). It turns out that in Raymond’s version of the story, Wendy (or Verna, as he knows her) is heading to Alaska not for the vague reason that she has heard that “they need people there,” but for the very specific purpose of getting a job as a line worker in a cannery that will allow her to save at least five thousand dollars, “enough to put a good dent in the Visa bills she’d racked up since her apartment had flooded in the winter, and possibly even get the collection agency goons off her back.”
From Raymond we learn that Verna’s comfort zone is “a scream’s length from humanity,” and that she chooses to camp out in the Walgreens parking lot because “the surrounding streets were quiet, but just the right kind of quiet — quiet enough to feel empty and unattended but not so much as to feel outright dangerous.” In the tale he tells, Verna does not go to the grocery store with the intention of stealing food, but instead impulsively decides to take a calculated risk after she discovers that a bag of dog food would cost $42, “significantly more than Verna could justify spending on such a day,” and that three cans, the short-term solution, would cost as much as two gallons of gas, or the equivalent of “almost fifty miles of road.” And we’re also granted a crucial bit of insight into her state of mind upon entering the store: “The store’s volume of inventory was immediately reassuring. Verna wandered among the bins of vegetables, the deep rows of fresh milk cartons and the multicolored boxes of breakfast cereal, feeling that all the fastidiously arranged food implied some well-organized system in place, the idea that someone, somewhere, was taking care that everything found its proper path.”
Given the collaborative nature of Raymond and Reichardt’s project, I don’t want to argue that “Train Choir” is better than Wendy and Lucy, but it did speak to me in a way that the film didn’t. In “Train Choir” Jon Raymond chronicles a few days in the life of a young woman who wants nothing more than “firm ground under her feet” in order to illustrate how brutally difficult it is for those whom our society has left behind to catch up on their own, and how it’s virtually impossible for them to take someone else with them. It’s about the kinds of choices that face a down-on-her-luck rugged individualist in America today. For someone like me who likes to think he doesn’t need any kind of help from anyone else, it’s a sobering tale.
In Wendy and Lucy Kelly Reichardt takes the same basic story and does something different with it, and with the help of “Train Choir” I was finally able to see what this is. I nominate as a “Rosetta Stone” of sorts a shot from the point of view of an employee at the pound where Wendy goes to look for Lucy. It begins like this:
and ends like this:
In both “Train Choir” and Wendy and Lucy, the woman whose perspective this shot shows is a distant, but basically sympathetic presence. In the former Verna starts to tell this woman her story, but finds it can’t make much an impression on someone who “had seen every kind of animal torment imaginable”; this woman is one of many people Verna encounters who has problems and obligations of her own that make it difficult or impossible for her to help Verna, or even see how close she is to the brink, and the point of their interaction is to impress upon Verna the reality of how alone she is.
The shot that ends the corresponding scene in the film is not about what Wendy sees, but how the world sees Wendy. Or, rather, how it doesn’t: this woman is helpful and friendly for the duration of her conversation with Wendy, but starts to forget her as soon as she turns away. By the time Wendy reaches the door, she has walked out completely of focus — she has become a blurry, indistinct presence in this woman’s mind.
See also this second “Lost Dog” sign that adorns the pole to which Wendy has taped one of her own:
and this bit of graffiti:
Both can be construed as traces left behind by others like Wendy who have long since disappeared. Once I began to notice touches like these, Wendy and Lucy started to make sense to me. Reichardt’s film is about someone in pain trying to survive in a world full of people made indifferent by their own problems. It is a plea directed at those who watch it: You who can afford to pay $8 for a movie, Reichardt is saying, it isn’t always enough for you to be kind and sympathetic to the people you encounter. Help them.
Thus, the lack of back story: it’s a way of focusing attention on the immediate cause of Wendy’s pain, the loss of her only companion and her attendant realization that she’s not even fit to care for a dog. This is what is threatening to bring her down, not some unnamed economic or emotional catastrophe in her past. It’s within your power, person in the audience, to help her, this girl who could be your daughter, your neighbor, your niece.
Thus, too, Wendy’s poor decision to shoplift. It is precisely that, a mistake, and as such it serves two functions: first, because there’s no doubt that Wendy is largely at fault, it foregrounds the regret and guilt that she feels upon discovering that Lucy is lost, contributing to our feeling (in the audience) that she is nearing the end of her rope. Second, it highlights the idea that fair (the store’s zero tolerance shoplifting policy, the garage’s flat towing fee) isn’t always fair when the playing field isn’t level; it is, therefore, another call to action: break the rules when the situation calls for it!
None of this is to say that I’ve completely reversed my position on Wendy and Lucy. Once I got a handle on what Reichardt was trying to accomplish, I was able to relax a bit and bask in the film’s more successful moments, such as the shot that follows Wendy’s conversation with her sister when she feels very far away from Wally Dalton’s security guard (he has someone to come pick him up):
and the one that marks the moment she feels closest too him, when she realizes how much help he has given her relative to his meager resources (this is a shot that I actually quite liked the first time around, too):
But for every moment like these two that I admire, there are still a few that feel off to me. Like that cross, or this distracting bit of slow-motion that presumably (and if so, unnecessarily) marks the exact moment Wendy decides to leave Lucy behind:
So I believe that Wendy and Lucy is inconsistent. I’m also not convinced that it’s a “major” film or that Kelly Reichardt is an “important” director. Clearly she has struck a chord with a lot of people, and with a bit of effort I was able to see why. The symbiotic relationship that both this film and Reichardt’s last one, Old Joy (2006), have with short stories by Jon Raymond is interesting, and her decision to give “quiet, but pointed consideration to the cinematically ignored economic anguish and wistful unhappiness of one end of American life” (as Daniel Kasman eloquently put it) is admirable.
As Karina Longworth points out in her review, though, this is a “single tone” film, and while it resonates with people now, I suspect that’s due in large part to the fact that it is currently filling a void in the cinematic landscape, and I wonder how much impact it will have a few years down the road. I also doubt that the particular “minimalist” style that Reichardt employs here will translate very well to other projects. My guess is that if Wendy and Lucy is remembered, it will most likely be for Michelle Williams’ performance.
Still, I definitely have come to respect this film. Earlier this month economist Robin Hanson posted a link to an eye-opening paper on his blog Overcoming Bias that concluded that the more important a trait is to a person’s identity, the less likely it is to be an area in which they want to improve. The target audience of Wendy and Lucy is people who think of themselves as having a lot of empathy — who else would want to see an “independent film” about a girl who loses her dog? Reichardt challenges people to question this self-assessment by confronting them with someone they could help, but probably wouldn’t were they to encounter her on the street. It’s a “feel-bad” movie with a useful purpose: to spur its viewers into action by increasing their awareness of how empathetic they aren’t. Does it succeed? Maybe not, at least not entirely. But I’m glad it makes the effort.
Further reading: in addition to all the articles linked to above, I found Adam Nayman’s review in Reverse Shot and Jonathan Raban’s New York Review of Books article “Metronatural America” to be helpful in thinking through this film. I also strongly recommend Livability, the short story collection that includes “Train Choir,” to anyone who enjoyed either Wendy and Lucy or Old Joy.
Edits: 7/29/09 = I changed the word “third” to “fourth” in the first sentence of paragraph 5.
