For a long time, Wendy & Lucy (2008) has been my least favorite of Kelly Reichardt’s works. That’s not a reflection on the quality of the film—it deserves every accolade it’s received, and is nothing short of an extraordinary picture. It’s likely her most essential work, a distillate of the neo-neorealism that took over American independent cinema in the wake of the Bush years. Its 16mm gracefully renders the real light of everyday, transforming the banalities of Walgreens parking lots and trash-filled train-side trails into the heightened world of cinema. It's the continuation of the project laid out by De Sica and Zavattini, of Rossellini, of the New Wave and Kitchen Sink, of Jost, Rogosin, Bresson, and Loden, and Akerman—all those who’ve tried to adopt a new form to get them that much close to the asymptote of realism. Reichardt’s cinema is a certain culmination of a thread of “realism” running through film history, one which emphasizes an ideological form as much as its content, and Wendy & Lucy is the primo example, the encapsulation of all of this, like how Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is for Chantal Akerman’s cinema.
That said, like with Akerman, I prefer the extremities rather than the most straightforward of masterpieces. I fell in love with Reichardt’s work being lulled into the deadly doldrums of the Oregon desert in Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and have a love-hate relationship with the prescient and perfect Night Moves (2013). I found myself in the disappearing Portland of my childhood in Old Joy (2006), and the Montana we didn’t know was fleeting in Certain Women (2016). I love the jazziness of River of Grass (1994) and the haze of the Super 8mm in Ode (1999). When falling head-first into Reichardt’s cinema, there was less to grab onto for me. I was reaching for the branches, without thinking about how Wendy & Lucy is the trunk—it’s the center with which all else extends out from.
I hadn’t seen Wendy & Lucy in over five years, and when I saw it was playing at the Paris Theater in New York with a Q&A from Reichardt, I thought it would be a good excuse for an Amtrak Points-fueled day trip. It’s a strange feeling seeing a filmmaker who felt recently to me to be an emerging voice presented in a repertory way. Maybe time’s slipping from me, and I’m getting old (although technically am still so young), and in a practical sense Reichardt is still on the come-up, able to make independent films with genuine stars for much more than a DIY budget every couple of years. While there’s more to be said about one of the most important American filmmakers working still subsisting by teaching while scrounging together funding for relatively small projects—by today’s standards, Reichardt’s made it. But there’s something to be gleaned by Reichardt’s continued precarity within an industry in decline—even at her best, she’s not that much farther away from falling into a continued state of emergency than her characters.
“Emergency” is a word that Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour highlight as central to Reichardt’s cinema in their Contemporary Film Directors book on the director, where “emergency, rather than a break from the everyday, might be a vision thereof.” It’s a result of “environmental degradation and economic decline,” which creates a “variety of neorealism [that] is historically unique; whereas midcentury neorealists focused on the already desperately poor or lower working classes, [Reichardt’s] features center on people who are slowly going downhill socioeconomically—or whom we can easily imagine doing so.” These are conditions which shouldn’t exist—yet they do, and thankfully we have Reichardt to guide us through.
Like the film itself, no character better portrays this essence than Wendy. Played by Michelle Williams in the first of her many great collaborations with Reichardt. Wendy’s a woman riding the on the razor’s edge of destitution across America when her car breaks down outside a Walgreens on the outskirts of Portland. It’s the Portland that feels farther than ever today—the one that was still post-industrial and not just a simulacrum of its crunchy veneer. Wendy finds a friend, or at least a passing helper, in the security guard at the Walgreens, played lovingly by Wally Dalton. He remarks that the mill shut down some years ago, and there’s not a lot of jobs left—he doesn’t know what people do all day.
Wendy finds herself in a further fix when she’s out of dog food for Lucy (played by Reichardt’s real life dog Lucy, who weaseled her way into an acting career by needing so much attention that she got a role in Old Joy). Wendy goes to collect cans for cash. She’s got a meager bag of them compared to the carts that most people are hauling, one of the more talkative guys in line points out to her, so she gives up on that venture. Instead she ties up Lucy outside the local grocery and does her best to subtly sneak out with a couple of cans, but is violently ripped back into the store by a busybody teenage employee who can’t wait to bust her for shoplifting. His cross necklace glistens in the wood paneled back office—the good Christian boy is nothing more than a chauvinist and shill for authority, punching down on the poor instead of lending them grace. When Wendy finally gets back from her prolonged booking process, Lucy’s nowhere to be seen.
People who can’t afford dog food shouldn’t have dogs, the grocery boy told her. That sentiment was shared by a lot of those who saw the film during its initial run. At the Q&A, moderated by critic Beatrice Loayza with the accompaniment of the film’s producer Larry Fessenden, Reichardt talked about how many audience members were judgmental about Wendy as a character. That looking down on the “lesser” and judging their actions harsher seemed endemic to Bush-era culture if we’re to go by Reichardt’s cinema—audiences hating the desperate actions of Wendy isn’t that far off from the way that Mark (Daniel London) is resentful of his old friend Kurt’s (Will Oldham) lifestyle in Old Joy. Mark “grew up” out of his punk youth and got a house and a car and a wife with a baby on the way, while Will’s just a burnout old head still bumming on couches. Mark hates Kurt because he’s not that far off from him, and there’s probably plenty of opportunities for him to fall back into that. Perhaps the most profound moment in Old Joy is at the very end, when Kurt interacts with a homeless man who’s wearing an outfit almost matching his own—with one wrong Kurt could become that man on the street asking for money. As is the same for many of those who judged Wendy: one bad medical bill or work injury or car accident and the fragile middle class life anybody has tried to build could be gone in an instant. Wendy’s journey is a controlled descent, one where she’s budgeting her way to Alaska to try to break back out of financial precarity, but every step along the way costs money, with more and more expenses with every turn—even the booking in jail cost her $50.
The most devastating moment in Wendy & Lucy, and perhaps Reichardt’s entire oeuvre, is when the security guard shows up to the Walgreens on his day off to tell Wendy he got a call that the pound found Lucy (he offered up his cell as contact because she doesn’t have a phone of her own). As he’s leaving, he hands her a roll of wadded-up bills, and insists she not say no. He drives away in his beat up car and unfolds the money: $7.
Some people laughed at the screening during the reveal. Maybe they were just uncomfortable, maybe it was some kind of pity, but it’s always disappointing to hear people react in such a way to something that’s so personally gutting. The only person in the film who acknowledged that Wendy was balancing on the same edge as themselves was the guard, and he gave all that he could, a sum so paltry it's apparently laughable. But it’s something, it's a gift he probably really had to think about what he could spare to give—not much, but it's something.
Reichardt’s films are so prescient because despite their down-and-out worlds, they still take place before the collapse. Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy are like Recession-era works; Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow (2019) are Westerns that take place decades ahead of the genre’s typical setting; Night Moves is a film about the war for the environment before we started to experience how bad things would get year-to-year, month-to-month, day-to-day. It’s hard to imagine all the people in 2008 looking down on Wendy, not knowing that just around the corner was the worst economic crisis collapse in generations—in 2025, it’s perhaps a more important film to consider than ever.