Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt's third film is Wendy and Lucy, in which Michelle Williams' down-and-out hipster, Wendy, searches for the director's dog, Lucy. In KR's previous film, Old Joy--not to be confused with Oldboy--I thought Lucy's performance edged out that film's leads, but here Williams holds her own.

And more so. This is a superb film and it's built around Williams like a little cabin in the redwoods. It seems somehow cozy and expansive, though there's nothing cozy about the futility, the darkness, knawing at the edges of this simple story. I'm not the first to be struck by its similarity to Carver, though it's actually based on a story by Jonathan Raymond.

I was impressed with the rigor and beauty of Old Joy, but ultimately didn't have enough curiousity about the characters to sustain the narrative minimalism. Here it was different. In Carver's best work, his effects come across in how the reader constructs the spaces between what he's given us and tries to resolve what he's denied us. Reichardt, too, allows us to know very little for sure about our heroine (that is to say, Wendy). She's "passing through," she's estranged from her family, she's counting her last hundreds in her drive across country, hoping to make it to the canneries of Alaska. Her golden retriever mix, Lucy, is pretty much all she has.

But we don't get cheap clues or clumsy exposition or voice-over or flashbacks or really anything more to help us fill in any other facts of Wendy's life. Rail-thin, she's largely desexualized in her hipster boy-clothes and cropped haircut, unless you like that sort of thing. She's still rather stunning, of course, because it's a movie and she's Michelle Williams. For that reason and because she's so down-and-out, she has our sympathy from the beginning.

And she continues to have it, for the most part, but throughout the film--and days later, it seems--many questions spin out from her circumstances, even as they deteroriate. It's a wonder to be watching a film that depends on you to help construct what you're seeing and doesn't simply spoon feed you. Wendy and Lucy, in its still, quiet way, constantly asks you to respond. What would you do in her shoes? Would you help her? How did she get here? What's the right move? How did she screw her life up like this? How far away from this am I? Your sympathies shift moment to moment as you scrutinize her more and more closely.

The film encourages--demands, really--a deep, close reading. Like Gus Van Sant's best work, Wendy and Lucy cannot merely be watched. To do so, frankly, is to risk boredom--it would be like watching someone else play a game. These films are meant to be engaged with, stepped into, like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Lucy the dog, by the way, is a remarkable screen performer. She was such a good doggie in Old Joy that she upstaged pretty much that whole movie by her very...well, joy, actually. Hmm, I think I've just realized something. Anyway, her long absence in the new film lends the story its dread, touching on, in its neo-realist way, the Northwest Gothic dread of Twin Peaks, the dark whistling pines at the forest's edge a metaphor for the unspeakable state of nature beyond.

We fear for Wendy that, though things look bad now, they may get much worse just down the road.