Wendy and Lucy

[osprey_archer]

Wendy and Lucy is the tale of an American drifter (played by Michelle Williams) and her dog Lucy, and to answer the question that I’m sure immediately popped into everyone’s minds: yes, the dog lives.

Despite the dog’s survival, the movie is (and is meant to be) pretty grim. It reminded me in a way of Debra Granik’s work, particularly Winter’s Bone: both movies are portraits of poverty, focusing on women who are poor, from families that have always been poor (theirs is not genteel poverty), who have little margin when things go wrong.

Our protagonist, Wendy, is headed to Alaska on the trail of a job that she may or may not be able to get at a cannery. Her journey started in Muncie, Indiana; when the movie begins, she’s made it out to Oregon, and her car won’t start.

Although a number of things happen over the course of the movie, in a sense that’s the whole story. Wendy gets arrested and spends a few hours in jail, during which time Lucy disappears, and Wendy tramps all over town trying to find her; but her fate is already sealed. Even before she paid the fifty dollar fine for stealing dog food, she didn’t have the money - wasn’t even close to having the money - to pay for the car repairs.

Obviously dreams crushed by the inflexible nature of monetary facts is not a cheerful topic for a movie, but it is a beautifully observed movie, about the kind of people who often aren’t the focus of movies unless they’re Horatio-Algering their way out of poverty; I watched it because it won many accolades, and they all seem well-deserved.

It is a bummer, though. Possibly not the best viewing choice for the drear days of 2020.

Comments

[kore]

Oh boy, it sounds great, and also like I would be in an anxiety meltdown about fifteen minutes in. People losing their pets is a huge DNW for me. Even just the threat of them losing their pets!

[osprey_archer]

This movie is like 85% pet-losing by volume, I gotta say.

[asakiyume]

When I think about stories like these, I think about how the story extends before and after the events portrayed ... How a storyteller is saying something about what segment of a life they show us.

... It does sound like too much of a bummer for me personally in 2020, and yet also like it's very good.

[osprey_archer]

2020 is really a year for happy fluff. (I say, right after posting about a documentary about Chernobyl.) Or, at any rate, I feel like my fluff to everything else ratio has been much higher than normal on the fluff side this year, in an attempt to compensate for, you know, reality.