"Wendy and Lucy" review

"Wendy and Lucy", director Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her 2007 indie marvel, "Old Joy", returns to a Pacific Northwest of equal parts natural beauty and desolation. Dressed in androgynous clothes, her hair chopped and boyish, Michelle Williams stars in Wendy and Lucy as a slacker waif adrift in a subculture of neo-hippie train jumpers building bonfires in the woods, bruised blue collars and a collection of vets and disabled hard-luck cases waiting at the corner store to exchange cans for change.
As Wendy is hauled away to jail, Lucy remains tied to a bicycle rack, one more tragic loss in a string of escalating disasters.These losses come with a devastation comparable to that in Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neo-realist masterpiece, "The Bicycle Thief".
Unlike Emile Hirsch’s adventuring, Alaska-bound dropout in "Into the Wild", Wendy’s is not a purposeful estrangement from the world.
There are foils and fairy godfathers along the way, but the overall impression Reichardt creates is of a cold, hostile world as immune to individual suffering as the Depressionera America of "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" or "The Grapes of Wrath".The only comfort Wendy finds is from the drugstore security guard (Wally Dalton) who first rousts Wendy from sleeping in his parking lot and then watches her contend with the ruined car and lost dog. His gestures of kindness are pitiably small, compromised by his own limited means.
Reichardt allows us so little access to her interior life that she seems opaque, her comatose demeanor hard to identify: Is it deep depression or soft-headedness? "Old Joy" went deep inside the loneliness and need for connection of its heroes, and Wendy and Lucy’s impact often resides in external events. Wendy can feel more like a symbol of economic despair than the soft and pulpy realer-than-real men of "Old Joy". But thank goodness for Reichardt’s committed focus even on symbols in the escalating miseries of our own hard times.
Source: www.nypress.com