{"id":1784,"date":"2009-06-08T23:17:26","date_gmt":"2009-06-09T03:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/?p=1784"},"modified":"2022-10-21T22:39:18","modified_gmt":"2022-10-22T02:39:18","slug":"wendy-lucy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wendy-lucy\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Passing Through: Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy<\/em> is, on its own terms, perfect. As such, it exposes the silly practice of rating films in numbers of stars, even if this particular blog is merely one movie lover’s journal of personal reactions, and not pretending to be objective criticism. So please interpret these five stars as meaning that I was utterly moved by Wendy and Lucy<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wendy (Michelle Williams) is a young drifter from Indiana heading nowhere in particular. Her home is a battered car, shared only with her beloved dog Lucy. She’s worryingly skinny, with an unexplained bandaged ankle. She keeps a running ledger in her journal, tracking the rapid decline of the life savings strapped to her waist. We don’t know why Wendy is on her own — whether she’s running from something or someone, or if she’s simply searching for a job. She calls her sister and brother-in-law in Indiana, but they evidently have problems of their own and quickly dismiss her. The poor, miserable girl never smiles, but often quietly hums a tune to herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Michelle<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One night, Wendy meets a group of young drifters by a bonfire. Icky (musician Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) mentions an Alaskan fishery that pays well and provides housing. This is good enough for Wendy, and provides her with a destination. But she experiences a disastrous day while passing through Portland (or in terms of her ledger, as least, the most cripplingly expensive). In short order, her car breaks down, she’s caught shoplifting, loses Lucy, and is very nearly assaulted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Michelle<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The security guard of the neighborhood Walgreens (Walter Dalton) becomes a genuine friend, whose greatest aid may simply be just talking with her. They briefly bond over the shared miseries of those that fall between the tracks: you can’t get a job without an address or a phone number, and you can’t get an address or a phone number without a job. People like her are always “just passing through.” He gives her $7, a gift he hides from his family, clearly a sacrifice for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wendy and Lucy<\/em> is spare and economical at only 75 minutes long, but it is heartbreaking and devastating. In some ways, Wendy is better off than the group of drifters she meets at the beginning of the film; she has a car, meager savings, and some discipline. But the number of steps it would take for her to become like them is few, and may happen in only a single day. One can only hope that Icky is right, and that Wendy will find some livelihood in Alaska.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy is, on its own terms, perfect. As such, it exposes the silly practice of rating films in numbers of stars, even if this particular blog is merely one movie lover’s journal of personal reactions, and not pretending to be objective criticism. So please interpret these five stars as meaning that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,2],"tags":[487,490,1333,46,488,483,482,484,485,486,489],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5-stars","category-movies","tag-bonnie-prince-billy","tag-deirdre-oconnell","tag-dogs","tag-drama","tag-john-robinson","tag-jonathan-raymond","tag-kelly-reichardt","tag-michelle-williams","tag-walter-dalton","tag-will-oldham","tag-will-patton"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/wendy-and-lucy-fence.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa9lhB-sM","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1789,"url":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/frozen-river\/","url_meta":{"origin":1784,"position":0},"title":"The Tenuous Border Between Merely Scraping By and True Poverty: Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River","author":"Chad Ossman","date":"June 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The title of Courtney Hunt's suspenseful Frozen River refers to both a literal body of water separating countries, and to the tenuous border between merely scraping by and true poverty. 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Working with real locations and relatively cheap cameras, this class of thrifty productions allows Soderbergh a rapid turnaround from conception to finished product. 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Kelly Masterson's screenplay tells the high-tension tale of a pair of wholly doomed brothers as a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "4 Stars"","block_context":{"text":"4 Stars","link":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/category\/ratings\/4-stars\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Before the Devil Knows You're Dead","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/before-the-devil-knows-youre-dead-feature.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/before-the-devil-knows-youre-dead-feature.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/before-the-devil-knows-youre-dead-feature.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/before-the-devil-knows-youre-dead-feature.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/before-the-devil-knows-youre-dead-feature.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6644,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/6644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chadossman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}