Dog days

Kelly Reichardt on her modern drama
of economic depression and a lost
canine, Wendy and Lucy

DEEPLY ADRIFT: Michelle Williams

by MARK SLUTSKY

It sounds like a Disney movie, at least on the face of it: a touching story about a solitary girl on a lonely adventure to find her lost dog. Even the title has a deceptive simplicity: Wendy and Lucy. But Kelly Reichardt’s first film since her critically acclaimed Old Joy is no fairy tale; it’s a quiet, moving parable of living a rootless life without a safety net, with Depression-era echoes that seem particularly suitable for this historical moment.

The film stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a drifter on her way to Alaska when her car breaks down in a small Pacific Northwestern town. “Stars” is actually not strong enough a word—she practically is the film, appearing in nearly every shot and in many wordless scenes that depend on the expressiveness of her open, round face and wide eyes. When she’s picked up for shoplifting and her dog—Lucy—disappears, what might be an inconvenience to anyone of means becomes a catastrophe to a woman living on such a slim margin. Over a few days, and through encounters with local characters played by the likes of Will Oldham and Larry Fessenden, Williams struggles to find her dog and keep her head above water. It’s a quiet film, stripped of most cinematic excesses (save for perhaps a musical nod to Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye), but deeply touching.

Reichardt, who exudes a bright, skeptical intelligence, spoke to the Mirror at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Mirror: Where did the idea for Wendy and Lucy come from?

Kelly Reichardt: I think the first seeds came post-Katrina—all the talk about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, the sort of real hostility in America towards poverty. Not just ambivalence, but hostility. Like “These people shouldn’t have gotten themselves in that situation in the first place!” Or the president’s mother explaining to us that these people are actually better off now that they’re living in the Superdome.

It sort of came out of that. John Raymond, the writer, and I, we just started looking at how, if you have no net and you’ve had a shitty education—which is easy to get in America—and you don’t have family support and you don’t have a trust fund, how do you actually get a toehold in the next level? Not even trying to get to the middle class, but how can you just get your life to the next step, get a leg up, so to speak? And we were watching a lot of Italian neo-realism, and New German Cinema, a lot of films that I hadn’t really looked at since college and going back and thinking about how those schools of filmmaking, all the politics, all the class issues, even the Angry Young Man British films of the ’60s, how they’re all really relevant to life in America right now, the huge gap between the rich and the poor. So that became the beginning of it, and it became a story about a girl and her dog.

Making do without make-up

M: Were you worried about coming across as too didactic?

KR: After those original conversations, all that stuff sort of gets thrown out the window. I would never have a conversation with Michelle Williams about the politics of the movie, it just becomes about Wendy. All of that are just early things that you bullshit 2about when you’re starting to write. John’s a real good monitor of not letting that subtext rise to the surface.

M: You must have had a pretty small crew.

KR: There’s no other option. It’s all pretty intimate; everyone’s in pretty thick. For better or worse. There’s no separation between cast and crew; I’m not sure Michelle’s ever been as exposed to the actual process and especially since she wasn’t having any hair or make-up, which would usually probably take an actor away from some of what’s going on. She’s in every single scene, so she’s deep in it.

Fortunately, she was just up for that and was actually pretty into it. My big thing before I met her was how was I going to approach the no make-up thing and how I’m going to ask her not to wash her hair for two weeks while we’re shooting—actually, longer than that, 20 days of no hair-washing! And she felt liberated by it, I think. And then Will Oldham, I didn’t even ask him, but I think he didn’t even bathe for like two weeks before his part to get in the mood! When he showed up, I was like, “Hey Will... P.U.! But thanks for throwing yourself into it!”

WENDY AND LUCY OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JAN. 30