MUBI

This is minimalist filmmaking at it’s finest. A message film in the most subtle of ways. On the surface it’s a simple, beautifully told story of a young woman falling apart due to economic crisis as she is looking for her lost dog. But writer/director Kelly Reichardt imbues her film with this underlying look at the self-centeredness at America. She’s not saying that every single person is worthless (there’s a wonderful subplot with an old man who helps Wendy), but that the average American is just too focused on their own selves to not even notice this innocent, decent young woman who is falling apart. People walk by and see her sleeping in her car but instead of thinking of what they can do to help, they just laugh and keep walking. Even a seemingly decent person like the mechanic Wendy takes her car to when it brakes down, doesn’t notice how far down she is. Or maybe he just doesn’t really care.

Maybe it would be different if Wendy was openly looking for help, but she isn’t. On the inside she is completely falling apart, but she puts on this front of indifference as if everything is alright with her. She tries to reach out to her sister and her husband, but they immediately act as if calling them is begging for a handout so she falls back on the lie that everything is fine in her life. But if you look at her for more than five minutes, you can tell that things are far from decent. Stories like this happen every day and no one bothers to realize it. Throughout the film you can hear, or see a few times, a train rolling through the scene and passing on. Reichardt uses this to symbolize the fact that America just rolls on by people like Wendy who are in such a state of decay, but they are moving too fast to stop and notice that she exists, let alone what a poor state she’s in. It’s a remarkably intelligent film under the veil of a beautiful story of a woman losing her dog.

Reichardt’s remarkably subtle, intuitive direction leads this film but it would have been nothing without Michelle Williams’ revelatory performance. She brings all of these emotions of anger, depression and even joy at the end right underneath the surface, but then holds them just below. It takes a highly skilled actor to make you instantly realize what’s going on inside of them, without allowing themself to pour all of that out. So in the moment where she does breakdown externally, it makes for a much more severe impact than if she had been crying the entire film.

I personally found Wendy to be a very relatable character. She’s an isolated, lonely person but she’s that way because she chose to be. It’s not that she thinks all people are worthless, but the people she meets are just so self-centered and uninteresting that she doesn’t bother taking the time to try and become friends with them. And likewise, they don’t take the time to notice anything about her. Instead she has friendship in her one true companion, her dog Lucy. So at the beginning of the film when she loses Lucy, I wept in sadness. And at the end, when they are finally reunited, I wept with joy.

I’m not going to lie this isn’t the liveliest of films, Some might find it downright dull. Strangely I found it compelling. I will admit it’s not the usul type of film I find myself enjoying. It’s short but I never found myself really bored. It’s a character piece that plays like a living book, No real story just circumstances and the more you learn about characters and the situations are more by chance then spelled out. It is a study in minimalism but it feels like much happens.

I guess the film is sharing in the experience of the main character played by Michele Williams. She has just stopped in this town on her way to Alaska with her used car and her dog. We go on her journey with her that plays like a tragedy though luckily sometimes light shines into her life it quickly feels like a cruel joke.

Michelle Williams really shows her talents as an actress willing to take risks to prove she is more then a pretty face. Coming from being a child star to a teen pin-up queen on “Dawson’s Creek” (Though I first remember her from SPECIES) This film is almost a one woman show, but the side characters though minor make a impact in their own way like reactionary props she works with and uses to shape her performance. While this film is not the liveliest and most exciting It’s still phenomenal. Not exactly a star making role, but one that shows her death and commitment to her craft.

To tell the truth initially I had no interest in the film. I had heard of it but really didn’t compel me. I more or less caught the film on a whim and was pleasantly surprised.

I.

Kelly Reichardt’s film Wendy and Lucy (2008) has often been compared to Vittorio de Sica’s Umberto D. (1952). Both films are about poverty, loneliness, and marginalized and discarded people searching for dignity, whose best friend is their dog. Both films are rooted in the small, ordinary details of day-to-day existence and focus on elements that usually remain off-screen. And both films favor natural environments and a documentary-like aesthetic.

Another film that struck me as similar to Wendy and Lucy was Robert Bresson’s L’argent (Money), a movie which more-or-less follows a counterfeit bill around and shows its influence on those who come into contact with it. Wendy and Lucy doesn’t follow any particular bill around but it does focus on the influence money has on the main character (Wendy) and the people she comes into contact with. Every person she encounters, save the woman at the pound, revolves around, or contains a mention or exchange of, money. Both films are filled with numerous shots of transactions, figures, bills, coins, and use personal stories to express how capital degrades human relationships. (I am reminded of one of Mark Twain’s famous witticisms: “The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.”)

Dehumanization is a theme in all three of the aforementioned films, but Umberto D. focuses on dehumanization through bureaucracy, while L’argent and Wendy and Lucy focus on money itself as as a means in which to portray people forsaken by society.

L’argent (1983)

II.

A few months ago Glenn Beck spoke on his television show about a book called We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of 2008. Naturally he was trying his best to mount a cohesive argument against it, but really he was just mocking it in his own inimitable way. During the segment he mentioned the slogan “people over profits” in a way meant to smear any group linked to it (by his logic this somehow proves they’re communists, and of course being a communist somehow proves you’re evil and think Stalin was a swell guy). By deriding “people over profits” he is acknowledging that such a mentality is in opposition to our current capitalist system, which, in his eyes, automatically marks it as something fundamentally flawed. But of course it doesn’t make a bit of sense to be against such a philosophy in the first place! His smear is so utterly ridiculous that it becomes comical, yet so few people seem to be in on the joke. (Glenn Beck and his listeners are just one easy example; I don’t mean to use them as a barometer of public opinion.) A lot of us, many who don’t even realize it (I hope), have bought into a system where money is everything and people are merely a means in which to acquire it. We think within the system. We work immoral jobs. We buy immoral things. The mantra is everywhere. It is the drumbeat of capitalism. Profits. Over. People.

“Gassing up in Erlanger, Ky., 40-year-old Lee Pullins of Springfield, Ohio, said the spill is “absolutely horrible” but will not affect where he buys fuel.
“I go where it’s the least expensive, even if it’s only two pennies cheaper,” he said."

How does one arrive at the point where “people over profits” is seen as an evil slogan? Surely this illustrates how ideological thinking can lead to the banishment of rational thought, but it also exposes money (profit, production) as the true God(s) of our culture. Only by giving something a supernatural power over us could we end up viewing it as being more important and valuable than our very lives.

III.

Recently in Greece, a group of anarchists walked into a store, loaded up some bags with food, smashed open the cash register, took the money, and then walked outside and burned the wad of cash in their hand. Yes, it’s easy to burn other people’s money (though I guess it’s technically theirs once they’ve stolen it), but the act still holds some symbolic value.

“Money is sacred in our capitalist society. And despite a lifetime of passing it around, very few of us have ever thought to destroy the lucre in our hands. We spend our lives working to earn it, and when we are feeling generous we donate it or if we are feeling frugal we save it. But we never flush it down the toilet or burn it or do anything else that would take it out of circulation. And even the thought of doing so can provoke anxiety.

To break the allegiance of the people to idolatry, Moses destroyed the golden calf, Jesus chased away the money lenders and Muhammad smashed the 360 false gods in the Kaaba. Today the paper bills we pass among us have become our idols and Mammon our god. To smash consumerism, we must do more than simply circulate our money to “green” or local businesses. We must also liberate ourselves from the religion of capital and the belief that money is sacred and can solve all problems." —Micah White

This recent act in Greece reminded me of an argument I had online a few years ago with someone (let’s call him Steve) about Chris McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild. Steve knew McCandless from having recently watched Sean Penn’s film version of the book, and, based on this depiction, he criticized McCandless for being a “very selfish individual”. By itself this criticism wasn’t enough to raise my ire, but when I asked him the reasoning behind it I became very annoyed with his response. I was expecting him to say something about McCandless leaving his family, but what he said was that McCandless was selfish because he had taken his last bit of money and, instead of “giving it to someone who needed it”, burned it symbolically on a rock somewhere out West. I argued that this criticism was totally without merit unless Steve was willing to apply the same label to himself, for surely he had “burned” his own money on televisions, computers, stereos, dishwashers, CDs, movie rentals, and all manner of other unnecessary things, instead of “giving it to someone who needed it”. After I said this Steve went ballistic: “I don’t know who you are, but I don’t want you to ever speak to me again!”

By destroying the symbol, McCandless was spitting in the face of everything Steve worked for. It wouldn’t matter what McCandless did with his money as long as he put it to use.

During middle school some friends and I used to occasionally take dollar bills out of our pockets on the playground and tear them to pieces in front of some of our classmates for the sole purpose of pissing them off / shocking them (it worked). The reaction this caused was not unlike what happened when my friend Justin took a Bible to class one day, noisily tore out a few pages in the back of the room, and blew his nose in them. (He performed this beautifully, as if it were a completely normal thing to do.)

The reaction destroying money causes in some people exposes not only their fanatical devotion to it (and consumerism), but also the power inherent in destroying it.

IV.

“Consume Less, Share More”

Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008)

Wendy and Lucy exposes a world in which our dealings with one another are usually predicated on some monetary exchange, where people with less are worth less, where “people over profits” sounds a bit impractical, and where we have come to view one another as commodities, customers, competition. (Form equals content.)

When we meet someone for the first time the first question normally asked is: What do you do? What’s being asked, of course, is not what we like to do or what we care most about, but how do we earn money. We define ourselves by our jobs. I am a lawyer. I am a mechanic. I am a sales manager. I am a janitor. I am a CEO. With these phrases, status and place are assigned. What does Wendy do? Nothing. But she’s going to Alaska to work in a cannery. Because she is without status, Wendy is slowly pushed to the margins of society. And out there on the margins she clings to the few tenuous links — a wad of cash and the dream of a future job — that keep her from falling completely by the wayside.

[spoilers follow]

The key scene comes after Wendy has been confronted by the homeless man in the woods where she was sleeping. She runs to find somewhere she can go, hysterical, and ends up in a bathroom. Once inside, she lifts up her shirt and unhooks the money belt she has strapped around her torso, and only after the belt has been removed does she let out a sigh — a great gasping for air followed by sobs of anguish. A giant weight has been lifted and she can finally breathe again. The money is the only thing that differentiates her from the homeless man in the woods. It is her dream kept alive, her purpose and destination. Yet only when she is without it does she feel free and unburdened. The money belt chains her to a world that pretends not to notice her.

The only genuinely kind and helpful character in the film is the security guard Walter. He goes out of his way to help Wendy whenever he can, and he appears to be genuinely concerned with helping her find her dog, Lucy. He’s probably more apt to help her because he’s with her in spirit (similarly, one of the jobless people in line at the recycling plant appears to be nice to her). Walter has been down and out before, he knows the system is a sham, and he does not approve of it. As he says to her at one point: “You can’t get an address without an address. You can’t get a job without a job. It’s all fixed.” When he finally comes to help her out near the end of the film, he’s out of uniform and no longer on the clock. Previously throughout the film, he was always around to help Lucy incidentally because he was already there, standing outside looking after the store. Only after showing up on his own time does he hand her some money — an amount too small to really do anything, but it’s all he can afford. The exchange is a symbolic gesture. Walter feels as though all the things he did before and all the kindness he showed her wasn’t enough. Up until now he never went out of his way to do anything; after all, he was getting paid for his time. But on their last meeting he wants to prove to her (and perhaps himself) that he truly cares, and he does this by giving her money. He believes, or perhaps thinks she believes, that money is what really counts.

“I want you to take this. Don’t argue.”

By focusing subtly on money, Kelly Reichardt shows us a down-and-out woman trying to make a better life for herself in a system driven by profit, where most people have been conditioned to play out their part even when it’s contrary to their own well-being or the well-being of others.

lottery – win $41,000

Wendy calls a relative who immediately stresses that they have no money to spare and therefore cannot help (even though that wasn’t why she called).

The mechanic gives Wendy a “deal” by only charging her 30$ – instead of the usual 50$ minimum – to tow her car a just a few hundred feet.

Ken Kesey’s novel is about about a group of union loggers at a mill who “go on strike in demand of the same pay for shorter hours in response to the decreasing need for labor due to the introduction of the chainsaw. The Stamper family, however, owns and operates a company without unions and decides to not only continue work, but to supply the regionally owned mill with all the lumber the laborers would have supplied had the strike not occurred.”

$REWARD$

An inversion of the gilded cage.

This movie affected me a great deal.
I can so much relate, feel empathy and understand what Wendy is feeling. No need for music, the story stands on it’s own.
And I liked the way Wendy’s motives were not made obvious to the viewers, those motives were not the point of this film at all.
The ending – no, it was not a decision made in a matter of seconds. Everything that happened after her car broke down were leading her to that tough decision, step by step. And it was a decision made of love.

I did not like, did not enjoy this movie. I feel it was a waste of Michelle Williams’ talent. A simple story with almost no arch and no compelling plot, as well as a bit boring. Simplicity in this case translates into nothing of substance. The cinematography is decent and Michelle’s performance is acceptable but that’s about it.

The director spends too much time on Wendy’s tribulations with her broken car, when she could have used that time to explore in more detail the character’s motives to be on the road. Searching for Lucy seems to be a metaphor for Wendy’s own soul searching but it falls short, very short of its intentions. The ending is very disappointing. Wendy goes through all the trouble just to decide in a matter of seconds, that her dog is better off with an unknown?

A wonderfully quiet, subtle film that shows that American independent cinema is capable of pretty awesome things that I would like to see more often. Deeply affecting in a serene, non-manipulative manner. Any emotion felt was due to the excellence of the central performance and human empathy on the part of the audience; there was no music to cattle-prod an emotional reaction out of us, and there was no overtly melodramatic acting. This film captured perfectly that feeling of anxiety bordering on hopelessness – but not quite there – one gets when they are away from home and made to wonder how long their few hundred bucks are going to last in the midst of car troubles and various problems that don’t seem to stop piling up. I’ve been there, but even if I hadn’t, I think these images would have proven great just the same.

One of the year’s best. Michelle Williams reveals greatness here. She feels ALL of our pain. There’s not a smidgen of Hollywood glamour in Wendy; Williams’ rendering of this lost soul breaks my heart. I saw this at the perfect time because, like Wendy, I was an outsider from the midwest who came to Portland, jobless, broke, and desperate. Even without those pangs of recognition, I would still love this film. To me, Michelle Williams’ character is like Jim Stark from Rebel Without A Cause: the embodiment and/or encapulation of young Americans at a certain point in time. Arguably my favorite film of 2008, only Let the Right One In and The Wrestler come close.

“Wendy and Lucy” es la segunda pelicula de Reichardt, quien tiene el merito de haber filmado anteriormente una pequeña gran pelicula llamada “Old Joy”. La directora se presenta como una de las mejores observadoras del cine independiente actual; observadora porque lo suyo es un cine que parece no hacer otra cosa que estar con sus personajes un momento, en un determinado punto de inflexión de sus vidas, para despues dejarlos ir, convirtiendo ese momento, esa vida, en algo significativo. En “Wendy and Lucy” se centra en Wendy, justamente, y Lucy, su perra, dos seres que andan en busca de algo, algo que la directora va mostrando de a poco, como pidendo permiso a sus personajes, como esperando que ellos mismo se lo muestren. Observa, no se mete en lo que no le importa. Sus personajes, tanto en su opera prima como en esta pelicula, parecen estas suspendidos, como en pausa. Vagan, esperando un momento para actuar, en espacios a los que la directora les da una importancia radical. En su anterior film, era el bosque, que se presentaba como un espacio oculto, como un limbo de vegetal. En “Wendy and Lucy” es una ciudad casi fantasma, vacia, lo que actua como ambito de los personajes. Todo en la cinta parece enfermo, como a punto de morir; hay un estado de abstracción realmente poderoso. Es a su vez, una road movie estancada, perdida. El auto de Wendy, que tambien utiliza como hogar, está roto, con lo cual no vamos (ni nosotros ni la directora) a ningun lado. Reichardt muestra con todos estos elementos, con todos estos indicios, que la protagonista tuvo un pasado dificil, que, evidentemente, ese viaje estancado parece subsanar, pero tal cosa se torna muy difici. Es, a su vez, una pelicula de un grado politico altisimo. El estancamiento, del auto, de la ciudad misma, es toda una declaración sobre un estado común en la sociedad norteamericana.

Cuando la pelicula termina, la sensación que a uno le queda es una muy amarga, si, pero tambien una felicidad enorme de saber de que, en un rincón del mundo, auqnue sea uno muy chiquito, todavia hay directores que se preocupan de hacer de las cosas menos importantes las mas importantes de todas. Y de hacer de la observación el oficio mas grande.

Wendy and Lucy (and every other poor sucker)
I can’t believe this movie was made in the “recession” climate that has enveloped the independent and mainstream Hollywood scene. Okay, maybe made, since the story is simple, and I imagine Michelle Williams made concessions, but WENDY AND LUCY’s distribution is a miracle.

Kelly Reichardt has made a masterpiece about what it must feel like to be a young person in a strange nation trying to overcome an economic downturn. This film is the gentle breeze that whisked off the violent storm that was INTO THE WILD. Fuck, after seeing this I thought about all of my friends suffering months without a job, with fucked up cars, with a dog we can’t take care of, not knowing what the hell is next- I know it has to do with me, too, but what about everybody else?

There are no fingers pointed at anybody in this film. Societies rules are bizarre: the fixed prices, the unjust self-righteousness, the inability to park here or sleep there. Yet it’s the way things have been set up in America: we’re born to be pushed around or be confined. We have to be made examples of if we live outside the dotted line that we’re expected to. People can be kind, sure, but in life it’s hardly ever as grandiose as something at the end of Tom Sawyer, or being given shelter by a kind family, in other words, there is no rich old tycoon to rescue you. You’ll get seven bucks from a security guard at best. We, the middle class, are so strapped that all we can give is a kind gesture. What are we supposed to do with that aside from smile and nod and move on?

It’s not that there’s no hope. There is. Wendy in the movie is crafty in her own way. Smart people survive. They hum. O, the humming. The humming in the movie is probably the hypnotic tune the madman on the pier in PIERROT LE FOU was talking about. There you go. We have a goal, in Wendy’s case it’s Alaska, this ray of hope, and we’re faced with so many obstacles, so all we can do is hum.

WENDY AND LUCY will be known by those who see it, and have lived what the film depicts, as a staple of these times. It also features a very cute dog.

(In response to the man below me: The best films are those that allow you to pour your life into them.)