Wendy (Michelle Williams) is currently living out of her car with her dog Lucy.
Hopeful that she can find work in Alaska, she is currently in Oregon when her car breaks down.
On top of this setback, Lucy goes missing.
As Wendy struggles to come up with a plan to fix her car, she races around the small town, searching for her dog.
If there is a scene I am forgetting, believe this is the first appearance of trains in a Reichardt film.
Rootless, implacable, unstoppable on the human scale, these giant machines feel like outsized metaphors for the world Reichardt’s characters have to move in.
Trains are both a signifier of the larger forces they cannot control, and an escape from them.
Reichardt makes movies about people struggling to find their way in a world that is not built for them - they are trapped and excluded from a society that is moving past them and is obsessed with consumption.
In Wendy and Lucy you get a feeling of helplessness.
There are so many wide, long shots of Michelle Williams staggering through the damp, worn town backdrops. There is an isolation to the compositions - you feel a lack of community.
The only person who shows her any care is the older security guard (Walter Dalton) at the mall where she is parked, and where her car broke down.
Set in the nooks and crannies of a small town - public restrooms, restaurants, loading areas of businesses - Wendy and Lucy is bleak.
It is not usually the kind of movie I gravitate towards, but Reichardt’s empathy for ordinary people and their lives is hypnotic.
There is a lack of judgment and an unwillingness to swing toward a more conventional take on the story, that keeps me onside.
The centre of almost every scene, Michelle Williams is fantastic.
Trying to maintain a sense of calm, you feel the character’s struggle to keep on top of her mounting problems. There is such a lack of histrionics to her performance, an absence of sentiment or one-note despair.
As with Reichardt’s debut, the ending promises movement, but it is bittersweet: Wendy does find Lucy, but she has to leave her dog behind.
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