December 22, 2008: Wendy and Lucy
Wendy and Lucy is a low-key, independent film which has crept onto a lot of 2008 top ten lists, not without merit. It’s a sparsely told story of a young woman and her dog who have fallen on very hard times, and chronicles a few days in her life moving through the US midwest as she struggles to make her way towards the promise of work and eventual prosperity in Alaska.
I’ve been watching the career of Michelle Williams since her days on Dawson’s creek, and while she may not have been originally envisioned as the one from that show who would go on to greatest fame and fortune, she has made quite a name for herself and is emerging as one of the top actresses of her generation. This was evident in her early work including the HBO original If These Walls Could Talk 2, and recently we’ve seen a strong and Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain as well as a key role in Synecdoche, New York last year. Unfortunately she’s had a heartbreaking time over the past year, following the death of Heath Ledger, her former fiance and father of her child.
Perhaps it was the heavy hype surrounding this film, but I found myself underwhelmed overall. To be fair, while this is a small production and I was expecting a character study, I maybe wasn’t geared to the right scale of events, as I expected more to happen and more ground to be covered. I may have been more affected if I knew the intimate scale of the film from the start. I’ve never known whether that calibration to the scale of a film is something I have a right to expect from the filmmakers or need to provide myself. To put specifics on my impression of the film’s structure upon first viewing, I found myself thinking that there wasn’t much of an ending, that not enough weight was given to her quest for work in Alaska, and that I couldn’t figure out the motives of anyone in the movie who either helped or spurned our heroine. But even as I write this, it becomes clear that a second viewing will be essential to bring justice to a review of the film.
On the other hand, Michelle Williams’ performance is tremendous, and she fully inhabits the character. Will Patton as a sympathetic (and honest!) mechanic brings a curious warmth to the film which is otherwise – by design – completely absent. Parts of Williams’ plight made sense to me and rang true, but I didn’t feel like it all added up in the end.
I can only conclude at this point that one’s impression of this film will depend heavily on where one comes from in life, including how close one has come to the edge of (or immersion in) poverty. As a person who has struggled at times with very limited money, I’m forced to realize that I was still leagues away from the level of desperation observed here. Being generally risk-averse, I’ve always felt that I would naturally cut down to bare-bones earlier than necessary in order to avoid a situation in which I was stuck with no choices, as our protagonist is here. But can we ever really know how we’ll behave before we’re faced with that? A character our protagonist encounters, who is ultimately painted as unsympathetic (I thought there might be a turnaround but instead his insensitivity was emphasized) tells Williams straight up that she shouldn’t have a dog if she can’t afford to feed it. I think there’s a very fine line between judging people’s choices (never mind telling them what to choose), and comparing other people’s choices to the ones you would have made. The former is unfair, and the latter is in my opinion essential to maintaining perspective and remaining open-minded. But I think the fineness of that line leads to an unfortunate consequence that it can be hard to identify with people (or characters, if we’re talking about fiction) who make choices so different from what we can understand. I might weigh my basic subsistence more heavily than a personal connection with a pet, but for someone else that pet might be the only thing they have to cling to in an otherwise miserable and hopeless existence. This is not to say that I have contempt for the other person or dislike them for their choices, but what I’ve got here is a movie which from the start focuses on a person whose actions don’t resonate with me.
So I’m conflicted about this film. A snippet from a review I saw called it “grim to the point of tedium”, and while I’d agree with the grim part, I didn’t find it tedious. I think it’s representative of how things might actually play out. It’s also noteworthy that most of the people our protagonist encountered were ultimately sympathetic and just plain nice. Unless an outlay of money is required, I think most people tend to be as nice and helpful as they can, and I believe that I would be as well, so that did ring true with me.
It only occurred to me after watching the film, and while thinking it through for this review, that the goal of reaching Alaska and finding work wasn’t a notion Williams was really tied to. I had wondered why there wasn’t more of a focus on that quest, but understanding that it was a desperate grasp and not a driving force will help me to come to my second viewing with a different perspective. Maybe I was expecting something more along the lines of Into the Wild.
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