I have to admit a soft spot for "dog movies" (good ones), especially ones featuring a dog named Lucy (the name of my wonderful Beagle). Setting that aside as much as I'm able, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday night's screening of Wendy and Lucy, a rare indie that rewards a patient viewer with a soaked-in emotional journey without much (if any) pretense or indulgent, inefficient filmmaking.
My Beagle, Lucy
During the Q&A for Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire the other night, he mentioned something Godard once said, which roughly paraphrased is that all you need for a movie is money, a girl, and a gun. Wendy and Lucy gives you two out of three, and though I enjoyed it a great deal myself and others have been effusively lauding the movie since Cannes, I felt like I'd been shorted some change once the movie was over. I won't spoil the ending, but as "French" as I like my movies, the finale will leave something to be desired for some, just as the movie as a whole will. This is not a slog by any estimation, but a deeply moving evocation of the tragedy of modern life.
The true reason to watch is Michelle Williams' performance, which in execution does far more than is required on paper. She gives such a naturalistic, lived-in picture of Wendy here that the movie becomes more of a nature film studying her character as an animal in the wilderness of "civilization" than anything else, which I assume was the point.
Michelle gives us a young woman who is on her way from Indiana to Alaska (the You Betcha State) on a search (we assume) for gainful employment with her faithful and only companion, Lucy the Golden Retriever mix. We join the action as her resources are finally disintegrating in her grasp as she gets to northern Oregon. Wendy is a fiercely independent person, the "leave me alone, I can do it" type, who has finally come toward the end of a rope. Precisely how far from the frayed end she is, we don't know, but she's losing her grip on her circumstances.
This performance is substantive, no bullshit stuff and deserves recognition irrespective of her gender. On the one hand, it's a tragic but endearing snapshot of the young, modern American Woman left to her own devices but at once, it's allegorically a picture of where my generation (and hers) is at this point. Our forebears have built up all this "civilization" and we're no better off necessarily than if we were just lost in the woods. At one point, someone mentions, "can't get a job without an address, can't get an address without a job, can't get a job without a phone," again paraphrased. I couldn't put what they're getting at here any better myself.
Michelle Williams carries the whole thing, and I have to say for Best Lead Actress. As people see the shows starring those that are being put in the Oscar pool assumptively, I hope one or two sift out of the mix and Williams gets in, because she really deserves recognition here. Nothing against the front-runners no one has seen yet or anything.
I repeat my favorite refrain, which is that the film is absolutely worth seeing, and you should avoid reading other reviews. I find many telegraph the entire plot, which ruins this movie more than others.
More AFF writeups to come, because as one does during a festival, I've gotten profoundly overloaded.