Reseñas de la crítica

Reichardt is not as interested in the scenic beauty of the state as she is its purgatorial nature, stripping away its beauty in service of illuminating themes of poverty and loneliness. Wendy and Lucy is the most vivid example of the infinite journey and all that informs its construction, visually and thematically, in Reichardt's cinema.

It's a small gem that has all the Americana of a John Ford movie yet recalls the naturalism of VAGABOND and even UMBERTO D. And like those movies it's about people literally living hand to mouth, an existence where a gift of $6 (which occurs towards the end) is truly a sacrifice. Owing much to co-screenwriter Jon Raymond's fiction, it unfolds like a perfectly constructed novella.

It's almost a structuralist triumph: how to make the most emotionally wrenching indie of the new era with as little narrative as possible... The film's genuine power comes not from transcending or expanding that piddling premise, but making the situation burn on your eyes like sulfur.

WENDY AND LUCY is a movie that whispers to rather than yells at. It's a cup of water and some nuts for our caffeine and sweets-addicted audiences. It has faith that the cinema can make the ordinary exciting and stimulating in ways that other art struggles or fails to.

Michelle Williams shows us crisis by crouching in a ball and merely pressing her palms into her forehead. This doesn't sound like much, but given the woeful lack of inner life for young women in American movies, Williams's single gesture of fatigue and partial defeat in "Wendy and Lucy" is momentous.

No winner-takes-it-all, last-minute bonanza for Kelly Reichardt, who in Wendy and Lucy once more offers evidence of steadily (and stealthily) becoming one of the most intelligent and humane American directors... Reichardt's filmmaking shows deftness and patience and an eye for stark beauty, with at least one image (the heroine silhouetted sitting on the hood of her car with a Walmart in the background) that's as evocative as a Walker Evans photograph.

Will Oldham's childish, nostalgic, and lyrical hummed theme for Wendy and her dog neatly encapsulates the film, which attacks a simple, sad theme with an exemplary, but modest cast and crew, who bring a powerfully sympathetic approach. The sadness is natural, and therefore all the more sad, and it takes a patience, a kindness, and a calm to bring an inner life, however painful, to such a film.

Reichardt is a minimalist first and a social critic second, which is to say that while "Wendy and Lucy" is as damning as any Ken Loach film, it preaches in a whisper, not a shout -- a whisper or, rather, a song, like the wordless, undulating hum that takes the place of a musical score. Evanescent and intangible, it dissolves into the air, leaving something tragic and mysterious behind.

Having the dog around raises the emotional stakes tenfold, and develops a kinship with Vittorio De Sica's Italian neo-realist classic Umberto D., which also revealed societal ills through a poignant dog-owner relationship. As with Old Joy, Reichardt has an excellent sense of proportion: She doesn't try to do too much, but what she does do is fully realized. Animal-lovers are hereby advised to bring the Kleenex.

As good as Williams is, the true star of Wendy and Lucy is Reichardt's exquisite filmmaking. Williams is a big piece of the celluloid puzzle but she isn't the puzzle itself. The movie is less about Wendy than about the environment surrounding her, how outside forces collide with human flesh, bringing us to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

Modest but cosmic... Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery.

With its recognizable star and universal animal-in-peril narrative Wendy and Lucy is likely to reach a much wider audience than its predecessor, but it's not a crossover bid. Consider it instead as another quietly urgent missive from what Oldham's Old Joy character described in front of that campfire as "a falling-tear shaped universe"—a melancholy realm that, for a lot of people, will look distinctly like reality.