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Wendy and Lucy (2008)

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Looking back at Kelly Reichardt’s astonishing first collaboration with Michelle Williams.

American Landscapes: The Cinema of Kelly Reichardt opens at Metrograph on Saturday, May 11.

How is it that we so often allow people to fall out of the fold? When Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) begins, and for much of the runtime to follow, we know little about Wendy Carroll, the woman at the film’s center, beyond that she is houseless, that she has a dog named Lucy, and that she is on her way to Alaska to hopefully find work. We know from the ledger she keeps among her things that she has only $525 and that she is on a route that has taken her from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Omaha, Nebraska; from there to North Platte; Salt Lake City, Utah; Boise, Idaho; and Wilsonville, Oregon. She is inching slowly across the country. 

She could be a nomad by choice, it’s true, a woman living off the grid as an act of will-but for the desperation we sense as early as the film’s opening scene, when, on a walk, Lucy runs off into woods and Wendy has to call after her for what must be hours. There’s a fear in that voice, a hesitation in her demeanor, which defies any idea we may have of Wendy’s situation arising from mere willfulness. It’s in the way that she recedes into the brush, with extreme caution, when she sees Lucy among a group of fellow nomads around a campfire and only approaches them, warily, after assessing the scene. Or in the way that, later on, she cautions Lucy not to bark while she heads into a store, because they don’t need the trouble. It’s in the guardedness of her sister’s voice on the phone when we hear her interject, before Wendy has even asked for help, that she can’t do anything, she can’t help, she’s strapped.

Wendy is not a woman running from her life by choice but rather a woman running toward what she hopes might be a new life, an actual life. Wendy and Lucy is the effort of a filmmaker working to detail the utter contingency of that condition. It elaborates a peculiarly American form of poverty, one in which the promised social net has failed and it is damningly clear that the broad vistas and sense of possibility that our mythologized, exaggerated sense of “the West,” that historic horizon of opportunity, is just that: mythology. Like the men and women of the doomed 19th-century caravan of Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy ventures west only to land herself in a limbo of history’s making-in her case, a town that no longer has an industry, has no jobs available to her, has peaked and petered out and is thus inopportune to bring her any relief. It is necessarily a stopover to somewhere else. But where? Long into Wendy’s journey, Alaska remains far away.

Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt on the set of Showing Up (2022)

Michelle Williams-one of Reichardt’s most consistent and insightful collaborators alongside writer Jonathan Raymond, whose short story “Train Choir” this film adapts-plays Wendy. The Pacific Northwest-perhaps Reichardt’s most essential collaborator of all-plays itself. (Lucy, Reichardt’s dog, making her second appearance after a brief turn in 2006’s Old Joy, plays herself, too.) With Old Joy and her first feature, 1994’s River of Grass, Reichardt had established herself as a staunchly independent talent to watch, but Wendy and Lucy was the film that, perhaps bolstered by its sudden topicality and Williams’s star power, introduced Reichardt to a larger audience.  

Wendy and Lucy debuted in 2008 and was, owing to the low-risk nature of its production (a 20-day shoot with a $300,000 budget) and the pared down, seeming simplicity of its style-to say nothing of its subject-a fitting testament to the kinds of films thinkpieces routinely claim we “need right now,” films of topical, political might that ostensibly tell us who we are. This was a year of paralyzing economic downturn and hysterical politics, an astonishingly convenient backdrop for a film about financial insecurity which, owing to Reichardt’s aesthetic specificity, her subtle eye for process and place, and her surgical knack for causally sculptural drama, made the film immediately emblematic. In contrast to most of the contemporary entertainment landscape, Reichardt’s film offered a hard but noble dose of what felt like practical, political truth. Against the escalating agitations of financial collapse on the news, the vigorous aspirations of “Yes, we can” in our politics, and the delirious bombast of a mainstream cinema which, with the release of 2008’s Iron Man, was tumbling toward a Marvel-driven sea change of its own, here was a humble character study about the humiliations of life as a newly anointed cohort of houseless Americans, baptized by the spiraling mortgage crisis, seemed to experience it. Not a new genre, but a return to basics, a seeming answer to the call for a refreshed form of social realism to counterpoint the political theatrics of the moment.

All of which clarifies what made Wendy and Lucy notable then; none of which explains what makes it astonishing to revisit now. I watch Wendy and Lucy today, from a vantage of 16 years distance, and with five subsequent Reichardt features in mind, and am amazed by what it does and also does not do. For its quietness, this is a disaster movie. Disaster happens naturally in this film. And it compounds, as it does for those living according to the bottom line. First, Wendy learns that she must move her car from the parking lot of a Walgreens, where she’s set up shop for what was likely meant to be one night. Then, her car won’t start. The nearest mechanic is not yet open. She tries to feed her dog in the interim, but realizes she’s low on food. She tries to steal food, but she is caught by a young grocery-store worker, an archetypal good-goody wearing a Jesus cross who makes an example of her by proving his own loyalty to an authority that diminishes them both. In jail, the fingerprint scanner barely works, like a bad joke. In the meantime, Lucy gets taken. Wendy spends most of the rest of the film looking for Lucy, trying to do something about her car, trying to get back on the road, but with little funds, nowhere to sleep, and only the company of a kind security guard who, in lending her his phone, becomes her sole lifeline.

Kelly Reichardt on the set of Showing Up (2022)

Reichardt’s to-the-moment filmmaking and Williams’s grim determination feed into our own sense of urgency. We start out with an awareness of how much money Wendy has, see her literally counting it out, and the rest of the plot plays out, in our own minds, according to the deductions at stake. The plot is a balance sheet. $50 for the fine at the jail. $125 for a new serpentine belt on the car, and who knows how much for the bus ride from the jail back to the Walgreens, or for the meager meals she eats, the copies of missing posters she makes, and on and on. There’s a common understanding of poverty in which people are all, in the lower rungs of the working class, just one inconvenient or unexpected bill away from living on the streets. Wendy seems to endure this five-fold. Losing Lucy is the tip of the iceberg, and the unbearable thing, the conclusion that Wendy and Lucy eventually confronts, is that separation may be more secure for Wendy and Lucy, both. Lucy is the love of Wendy’s life. But life is cheaper without her.

The film does not amount to a thriller in the style of, say, the Dardennes’ films, with their muted but often nauseating suspense. There is suspense over the question of what happened to Lucy and whether Wendy will get her back. But it is not as if finding Lucy will bring any grace or relief, not when Wendy is spending so much of the little money she has, so quickly, with so far still to go. And not when, as the film reminds us-as Reichardt’s films, writ large, are poised to remind us-Wendy is a woman, and she is alone. It needn’t take scenes of transparently gendered danger for this to be clear, though Reichardt provides plenty, as when, sleeping on a cardboard pallet in the woods at night, Wendy is approached by a houseless man whose demeanor wavers between sympathetically lost and sexually menacing. Crucially, this man’s own difficulties show us Wendy is not in danger only because she is a woman but because of the additional vulnerability of her financial status, a vulnerability that this man shares. Who would he be, in better conditions? And Wendy-who would she be?

Certain Women (2016)

It may not seem so, because Wendy is unemployed, but Wendy and Lucy is a film about work. The cruel irony of placelessness and joblessness is that what you lack is precisely what you need to rectify that lack. As the security guard says, “You can’t get an address without an address, you can’t get a job without a job.” You cannot get work without working. You cannot plan without a plan. Reichardt’s filmography is often, aptly, noted for her attention to people on the margins of the social order, be it because they are environmental radicals, rootless men making sense of nascent, early American economies that do not yet make sense, Indigenous peoples unwillingly bound up in the fates of white American traditions, or women whose lives are delimited by their solitude, their loveless marriages, their independence as artists. The marginality is clear and consistent. But so, too, is Reichardt’s at times startling emphasis on the labor demanded. I’m thinking of the extraordinary tableaux of the women of Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and the emphatic images of their washing, caretaking, assisting in the effort to hoist a wagon train down a craggy mountain. Or of Lily Gladstone in Certain Women (2016), notable for her solitude, yes, but working throughout, caring for the horses in the stable where she’s employed, brushing them, feeding them, her body always in motion even as her tightly coiled inner life seems unnaturally compressed, fit to spring forth with feeling at any moment. 

Wendy and Lucy, too, is a film about the labor of making one’s way, the constant upkeep involved in a life that our dominant political narratives about poverty might con you into believing to be more idle. Wendy is always moving, always reaching: there is always a problem to solve. The pace and texture of that effort shifts, which is one of the canny observations afforded by Reichardt’s approach to the material, but the effort itself is unending. Notice what losing Lucy does to Wendy’s ambition to get to Alaska-to her “plan.” Earlier on, we see her hunched over her notebook taking stock of her funds, doodling, humming-gestures which we realize for Wendy are tinged with aspiration. Settling her accounts is a way of properly accounting for her future. Only after confirming that Lucy has been found does Wendy consult her notebook again, pulling out a map and her ledgers. She can now move on. 

The tragedy is in the moment that follows, when the mechanic, played by Will Patton, notices that she has Indiana plates, meaning that she’s come a long way. “Got a long way to go, too,” she says, at long last with her eye back on the future, smiling for the first time in what feels like ages. That’s the lilt, the conversational ease, of a person who seems doomed not to make it precisely because she suddenly believes that she will. Another filmmaker would wring a cruel bite of irony from this. That is not Reichardt. That is not this film. We believe in Wendy. We have to. 

K. Austin Collins is a film critic whose writing has appeared in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. He is the author of forthcoming books on Frederick Wiseman and Black police officers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Showing Up (2022)