Wendy and Lucy.

"At this point, it's not a stretch to say that [Kelly] Reichardt has positioned herself as a major American filmmaker," writes Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot, "no matter how many times critics - even sympathetic ones - describe her films as 'minor.' Certainly, they're produced in a minor key - Reichardt is a congenitally understated director, and good for her - but at the same time, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy resonate with anger at a country that allows people to slip through the cracks (she says her initial inspiration for the project came in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and suggestions from conservative pundits that the displaced residents of New Orleans might have worked harder to avoid their fate) and encompass a wide and nuanced spectrum of attitudes, ideas, and contradictions: the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest as a locus of both loneliness and self-discovery; the possibilities of Kerouacian escape against the harsh realities of what it means to be 'on the road'; the slow, steady erosion of counterculture idealism in a bitterly divided America."

Updated through 12/14.

"Waylaid by car problems on the suburban fringes of the city, Wendy and her dog, Lucy - previously seen in a small role in Old Joy and here elevated to star status alongside a gloriously subdued Michelle Williams - face an increasingly dire financial situation," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE. "Reichardt, working from a script co-written by Jon Raymond and based on his short story, attentively chronicles a life held together by little more than duct tape as it slowly comes apart.... At times so understated its impact seems almost imperceptible, Wendy and Lucy possesses a striking capacity for emotional expansiveness that patiently unveils depths of profundity."

"It ties into current economic fears and the question that many people must be entertaining these days: if the very worst happened to you, just how bad could that get?" Phil Nugent in Screengrab:

Just as religious conservatives are sometimes quick to react to movies that explore religious themes in ways that offend them of being blasphemous, knocking a movie like Wendy and Lucy for being unimaginative and sentimental and shameless can get you accused of complacency, of not being aware that there really are people in straits as desperate as those that Reichardt's heroine falls into.... Whether they were fiery protest melodramas like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or romances like Man's Castle or sporty comedies, the best Hollywood Depression movies made audiences of all social and economic classes feel close to people living out hard luck stories by making them smart and funny and resourceful enough that viewers wanted to identify with them. Old Joy encouraged intelligent viewers to identify with that self-pitying part of themselves that made them want to feel that their best years were behind them and all hope was lost, and if you have the price of a ticket, Wendy and Lucy can only make you feel, 'There but for the grace of God...' Letting your anger turn to rue can make for both ineffectual politics and dull movies."

"Williams is best-known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain, but she has done wonderful work in many small films (Land of Plenty, Me Without You), and she's wonderful, too, in Wendy and Lucy," writes Marcy Dermansky. "She gives a vanity-free performance, clad in the same cut off shorts and blue zippered hoodie through the film.... In an 82-minute film where little happens, Williams is always interesting to watch."

Interviews with Reichardt: Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog) and Ryan Stewart (Slant).

Peter Knegt talks with Williams for indieWIRE.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto and New York.

Updates, 12/10: "The Northwestern setting might put you in mind of a story by Raymond Carver, whose clean-lined prose has something in common with Ms Reichardt's reserved and attentive shooting style," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "At first glance Wendy and Lucy looks so modest and prosaic that it seems like little more than an extended anecdote.... But underneath this plain narrative surface - or rather, resting on it the way a smooth stone rests in your palm - is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society."

"Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Spare, actor-driven, socially aware, and open-ended, Wendy and Lucy has obvious affinities to Italian neorealism. Reichardt has choreographed one of the most stripped-down existential quests since Vittorio De Sica sent his unemployed worker wandering through the streets of Rome searching for his purloined bicycle, and as heartbreaking a dog story as De Sica's Umberto D. But Wendy and Lucy is also the most melancholy of American sagas."

"If 2009 really brings with it the second coming of the Great Depression, then Reichardt is all set as its cinematic poet laureate," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "As Wendy moves among the train-hopping punk kids, can-collecting homeless people, deranged bums and marginally employed service-sectorites of this particular American nowheresville, the filmmaker captures a nearly operatic range of defeat and desperation.... Reichardt is a tremendously conscientious filmmaker, and not out to torture the audience. Yes, this is a fraught and agonizing story, but the way it ends, although heartbreaking, is absolutely right."

"Though it's a testament to Reichardt's deft storytelling skills that she and co-screenwriter Jonathan Raymond make Wendy her own worst enemy and not just a martyred victim of the System, there's little conflict within this character to allow Wendy and Lucy to achieve the melancholic grandeur of Old Joy, a subtle fable about drifting friends that contains universes," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "W&L is not 'not about anything' (quoth a friend who brushed the film aside) but it's also, as Adam Nayman has written, 'ultimately... about a girl and her dog,' and doesn't expand much outward."

Jason Jude Chan talks with Reichardt for Flavorwire; so does Kristin McCracken for Tribeca.

Online listening tip. Williams and Reichardt are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Alison Willmore talks with Reichardt at IFC.

"Wendy and Lucy... is the American cousin to the Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door. "Like the Dardennes, Reichardt is interested in studying the intricacies of everyday life for those living on the margins - and society's cold indifference to their very existence."

"Reichardt has an excellent sense of proportion: She doesn't try to do too much, but what she does do is fully realized," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Bilge Ebiri talks with Reichardt for Vulture.

Update, 12/11: "Wendy and Lucy is a work of self-conscious manipulation, in which Reichardt filters out the cinema's subjectivity and personalism in order to intensify the viewer's sympathy with a cipher," argues the New Yorker's Richard Brody. "The ostensible objectivity of Reichardt's meticulous naturalism is a device that she uses to portray a sliver of physical reality as the whole truth; her rejection of psychology as well as of cultural context plays false and reeks of demagogy."

"Wendy and Lucy plays to me like a small-town noir film from the 1970s," proposes Matt Dentler, "but without any violence or exclamation. Instead, it's as if all the moments of heightened action and noise, were pulled out of the final product. Imagine Billy Jack without the kung-fu, or Walking Tall without the criminals. Stylistically, Wendy and Lucy feels like one of these films, except the hushed moments on introspection are all we see."

For James Van Maanen, this is "the most wrenching love story of the year (maybe several)."

"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 Depression-era America of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? or The Grapes of Wrath," writes Felicia Feaster in the New York Press.

Update, 12/13: "It's possible to think of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy as the anti-Slumdog Millionaire," suggests Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "Where Danny Boyle's flashy fantasia offers economically depressed audiences a miraculous distraction from their daily woes, akin to the MGM musicals that flourished during the Great Depression, Reichardt's haunting, mournful film engages the texture of a life in which money and hope are equally thin on the ground."

Old Joy "managed profundities that few filmmakers accomplish in a career," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "Wendy and Lucy does work, like a sad ballad for the must-love-dogs crowd, but feels disposable. It's a minor disappointment from a major artist."

Zachary Wigon talks with Reichardt for the Auteurs' Notebook.

Update, 12/14: Mark Olsen talks with Reichardt and Williams for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at December 9, 2008 2:35 PM