Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt is a minimalist filmmaker whose previous feature was the pastoral Old Joy, which had its charms, but was no where as impactful as her 2008 release, Wendy and Lucy. The two films bear certain similarities: Wendy and Lucy is filmmaking on a shoestring budget, and is paced extremely leisurely. But even though the film focuses on the immediate problems of one person, it is something for a stand-in for recession-era America.

Michelle Williams is Wendy. She is a young woman on her way to Alaska, where she hears they are hiring workers. We don't know too much about her, other than she's from Indiana and her closest companion is her dog, Lucy. The dog, a modest bankroll, and an '88 Accord is all Wendy has, and one day while passing through Oregon she almost loses all of it.

She awakes from slumber in her car to find that it won't start. Then she gets pinched for trying to shoplift dog food, collared by an over-eager stockboy who is a searing avatar for the Fox News culture ("if someone can't afford dog food, they shouldn't have a dog," he says imperiously). While Wendy is being held by the police, Lucy disappears, and her bankroll is threatened by the prospect of an expensive repair at the local garage.

That story is a tale in miniature, but whether or not Wendy finds Lucy is as fraught with suspense as any summer blockbuster. When a person has almost nothing, the loss of that something is as big as the world. A lot of the success of this has to with Williams, who gives a lovely performance. She doesn't have a lot of dialogue, but the expressions on her face speak volumes. There are some lovely moments with a drugstore security guard who befriends her, and an emotionally wrought scene in a gas station bathroom, when her world is shattering around her, is pointedly poignant.

I watched a lot of this movie with my heart in my throat, none more than the scene in which the mechanic (Will Patton) gives her some bad news. How often I've sat in auto shop waiting rooms, white-knuckled, waiting for good or bad news. It really can be life altering.