EW Movie Review: "Wendy And Lucy"
By: Owen Gleiberman - Entertainment Weekly
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Director Kelly Reichardt, who made the highly acclaimed art road film "Old Joy" two years ago, has now returned with her followup movie, "Wendy and Lucy," which is playing at Film Forum.
As a director, Reichardt is drawn to long, elliptical silences that speak more vibrantly than words. More than that, she's drawn to characters who might be described as "dropouts without a cause."
Wendy, played by Michelle Williams, is a drifter with a college-punk chop-shop haircut and an air of mopey passivity. She looks about 20 years old, but in spirit she's a teenage runaway. On the road with her dog, Lucy, she's trying to get to Alaska in a rusty Honda on a budget of $600.
But when her car breaks down in a small town in Oregon, Lucy now goes nowhere. Williams makes Wendy's total lack of affect luminously expressive. Wendy has encounters with a number of local folks, yet she never makes any real connection.
Like Will Oldham's cranky hippie in "Old Joy," Wendy's a lost-soul bohemian straggler in a world that no longer has context for such a person. No context, that is, but oblivion.
Wendy ties Lucy up outside a supermarket, and after a shoplifting misadventure, she returns to discover that the dog has disappeared. Can she find her?
"Wendy and Lucy" is a contradiction - a deeply austere art film with a sentimental heart. It's like "Lassie Come Home" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Reichardt views the total renunciation of society with something close to righteous purity, as a leftist romantic dream. That is what's piercing, and a little disturbing, about the movie.
"Wendy and Lucy" is in theaters now.