I will likely never see Wendy and Lucy again, and I'm okay with that. It's difficult and sad and depressing and tragic, and it's rough to to sit through.
That being said, it's important and necessary and should most definitely be seen.
It's a simple plot -- Wendy, a young woman with a car, a dog and $525 to her name, gets sidetracked in Oregon en route to a job at a cannery in Alaska when her car breaks down and her dog, Lucy, runs away. The film follows her over the course of a few days, detailing her increasingly desperate attempts to get out of her situation in unflinching detail.
Wendy -- played by the spectacular Michelle Williams -- just can't get a break, and the real tragedy is that no one really cares. Clutching a dirty pillow and carrying everything she owns in a duffel bag, she moves through the tiny Oregon town in a daze. Every now and then she lets out a plaintive "Lucy!" It is, in a word, heartbreaking.
Wendy and Lucy is a sparse little film, with no soundtrack and only a few characters. Wendy herself is largely an enigma -- we know that she has a married sister in Indiana who can't be bothered with her plight, that she keeps a careful record of her finances and that, for whatever reason, the most important thing in her life is Lucy. Wendy's a blank slate -- but I think that's why I found myself worrying about her literally five seconds into the movie.
We care about her not because she's a standard indie-film goddess with a quirky backstory and a distinctly optimistic outlook on life, but because she is a sad little everywoman without a plan or a future. We care because under the right circumstances, she could be any of us.
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That's what does it for me, too. You can't write her off as someone else's sister or friend or burden. She's such a cipher that it becomes entirely too easy - and very quickly terrifying - to project yourself onto her.
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