A girl and her dog in a worse-for-wear '88 Honda Accord trek from heartland Indiana through the Pacific Northwest for the pole star of Alaska. It's not a lark or a Kerouac road trip, but more akin to the westward push of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. Only Wendy faces necessity as an individual with no supporting family or memory of community, traveling into the unknown alone-except for her yellow retriever Lucy.
Wendy and Lucyis one of the more remarkable American movies of the last years, an indie film made on a budget almost as penny-wise as its cash-strapped protagonist, a human story unfolding in places Hollywood would never go. Wendy's car stalls in an Oregon mill town whose mill has closed, she is busted for shoplifting food for Lucy and, when she pays her fine and is released by the police, her dog, left tied to a lamppost outside the supermarket, is gone.
Most of Wendy and Lucy concerns the girl's search for her missing companion, possibly the only creature in her young life who hasn't let her down. Wendy, played with unaffected grace by Michelle Williams, must find her way in a bleak corner of America where opportunities have been exhausted, a place populated by rule-bound little pricks, psychopaths or people who will scarcely offer anyone the time of day. The old man who guards the railroad depot is the only person who tries to help.
"I hear they need people up there," Wendy explains when asked about Alaska, the final frontier. Directed by Kelly Reichardt with patient reticence and without a sugary Hollywood soundtrack, Wendy and Lucy is a quiet story set against the ambient hum of everyday life, observant of the small details of Wendy's existence and paced at the amble of its protagonist, moving slowly in a society in a hurry to go nowhere. Filmed a year before the first alarms were sounded over the Great Recession, Wendy and Lucy's vision of hobo campfires in the woods and a new generation of migrants riding freight cars in search of work seems strangely prescient.
