Wendy & Lucy (2008) DVD

The monumental stillness and unflinching naturalism of Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 feature Old Joy made for an experience that many found overwhelming, and some found surly, bleak and off-putting. It was certainly a challenging film, one destined to linger in the mind for a long time afterward, but even some of us who loved it could not entirely dispel the occasional and fleeting suspicion that we had somehow invented many of our own emotional reactions to it out of a desire to see films like this succeed; inferred a narrative core that really wasn’t there at all, because a film so admirable must surely deserve our love.

Either way, Reichardt’s follow up, Wendy & Lucy, not only brims with the same confidence on show throughout her previous film, but builds on its themes of alienation and the comfort of despair, and opens them out without ever trading-up or dumbing down to anything approaching simple values or easy resolution.

Michelle Williams is Wendy, a frumpy late-twenties fuck-up who’s just about together enough to keep her dog, Lucy, fed, her rusty car half-full of gas and a lo-fi but determined dream of making her way to Canada just about alive. When she breaks down in a nondescript Oregon town it seems like nothing more than a bump on the highway, but events snowball in a slow, crushingly everyday fashion until she has to make some hard, hard choices and face up to what being an adult actually entails.

It’s a film that earns every bit of emotion it will undoubtedly wring out of you and one that you will honest-to-god treasure for years to come.