Wendy and Lucy

Because Silent Light had started late, I barely had time to go back out into the street to the ticket window and buy a ticket for Wendy and Lucy, which was showing in the same auditorium right after it. Within minutes I was back in the same seat, with a nice large chocolate chip cookie from the concession stand, a special treat for my trip to the Village.

Wendy and Lucy blew me away. I'd heard a lot of good things about it, and it lived up to all of them.

It's a simple, short movie about a young woman (Michelle Williams) traveling across country with her dog. They are on their way to Alaska. She started out in Indiana, and the movie takes place in Washington County, Oregon, just south of Portland, where she has reached by the start of the story.

She has almost no money, and keeps track of her meager expenses in a notebook.

The movie completely broke through and shattered the Hollywood taboo about poverty. Specifically, characters are conventionally not allowed to be broke. They might be strapped for cash, but they always have resources somehow. No one ever runs out of money, and faces the grim reality of what life is like in America when you have exhausted your financial resources.

What happens to her is a mini-dissertation on just this topic. One of the best lines in the movie is spoken by the security guard at a Walgreen's, whom she befriends: "You have to have a job to get a job."

At another point, he looks at the people in the neighborhood (I think it was filmed in the town of Canby) and says, "I just don't know what these people do all day." If you've traveled through small-town America, it's a thought that you can't help having over and over.

In many ways, the Great Depression II already started in this country. It just hit the bottom rung of socio-economic ladder first, and is now working its way upward. The news media will stay ignorant of it as long as they can go back to their nice apartments in Manhattan and Long Island.

Among 2008 movies, Wendy and Lucy belongs alongside The Wrestler and Frozen River as the most powerful statements of the "reality" that our country faces, but which are continuing to push away until the last possible moment. It's a story about just one young woman and her travails, but is also the story of an entire generation of Americans in a way, even if they don't know it yet.

One of the ironies of the story is that most of the characters she meets are sympathetic. They've already been caught in the same wretched system, and are doing their best to cope with it. She meets one asshole---a young born-again Christian fittingly---whose actions cause her the most misery.

The narrative is tight. What happens is what must happen. The ending is exactly what had to happen, to resolve the tension of the story, which was only eighty minutes long. The storytelling has a beautiful symmetry, in that what happens in the opening scene also prefigures the ending as well.

Another highly positive aspect of the movie is its reality-based depiction of Oregon, a state that many outsiders often romanticize, especially East Coasters and Californians. The Oregonians I know will tell you that the place is more complex that is often depicted. Wendy and Lucy is the one of the best portrayals of the down-and-out lower-class aspects of life in the Pacific Northwest, after the collapse of the timber economy, which never make it to the Hollywood screen (arguably the best such portrayal since Drugstore Cowboy (1989)).

As the credits rolled, I heard an older gentleman behind me tell his wife, "Well it certainly doesn't make me want to move to Portland." I know a few people there who will welcome such sentinments.