Wendy Carrol (Michelle Williams) lives a solitary life on the road. Accompanied only by her dog Lucy, Wendy is on her way to possible job opportunities in Alaska when she gets stuck somewhere in Oregon due to car troubles. Now she has to figure out how to get her car repaired with what little money she has in a region unfamiliar to her. It's a simple story, but one that serves as a great example of how character motivation, not scale, are the best informers for how emotionally intense a movie can be. Wendy's problems are intimate in size but they're harrowing to experience because of how writers Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt (the latter also directing) make it abundantly clear what how precarious Wendy's daily life with minimal money and no guaranteed shelter is.
Interestingly, Wendy and Lucy shares more than a few similarities Meek's Cutoff beyond just the fact that they have the same lead actor and director. Both detail characters headed on an extensive road trip taking them through an unforgiving landscape to an uncertain destination. Whereas Meek's Cutoff was all about a variety of settlers and their interactions during their voyage, Wendy and Lucy, in a move made to emphasize how isolated Wendy is from conventional society, is primarily a one-person show centered almost exclusively on Michelle Williams' protagonist. If you're gonna center a whole feature almost entirely on just the performance of a single performer, Michelle Williams might be one of your best bets out there.
Williams does so much exceptional work in this role but I especially love how she manifests the persistently frustrated nature of Wendy in a heartbreaking manner. This is a character whose whole existence is balanced as delicately as a stack of cards and the script constantly throws in new pieces of conflict that serve as wind that can easily blow down her existence. All of the emotional weight that puts on Wendy is consistently conveyed in a powerful fashion through the lead performance of Michelle Williams. She always makes the humanity of this character agonizingly apparent even in the most subtle scenes of emotional turmoil for Wendy, though she makes sure to imbue Wendy with enough of a personality to ensure that she isn't exclusively defined by her financial-related chaos.
Michelle Williams does phenomenal work throughout Wendy and Lucy, but my God, she just delivers perhaps her most emotionally harrowing work ever (yes, even more so than her iconic Manchester by the Sea scene) in one of the last scenes of Wendy and Lucy depicting Wendy reuniting with her lost dog Lucy. Seeing Lucy being taken care of in a new owners yard, Wendy is so happy to be reunited with her canine after she's been gone for a few days...and then Williams, just through her facial expressions, communicates the process of Wendy slowly realizing, as she plays fetch with one of the few friends she has in this world, that Lucy has to stay here with this new owner. She can't take Lucy away from a better life just for her own sake.
It's a realization that Williams conveys so potently that it breaks your heart well before her character outright says (albeit in a strained manner that nicely indicates how hard it is for Wendy to say this) to Lucy that she has to leave her here. Michelle Williams is the reason this heartbreaking sequence works so well and in this powerhouse scene you can see why it was such a brilliant idea to hinge an entire motion picture on the talents of Michelle Williams as a performer. Also impressing in terms of performances is the one key supporting player, an unnamed security guard played by Walter Dalton. The character is an oasis of kindness in a world of roughness and Dalton's portrayal of this individual lends an appropriate layer of genuine and heartfelt warmth to the part.
Both Dalton and Williams are working under the assured directing of Kelly Reichardt. I've only seen two of her films as of this writing (Meek's Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy) but Reichardt seems to have a gift for making subdued pieces of cinema that pack a wallop in terms of pathos. Certainly, Wendy and Lucy accomplish that by making every bit of the trials and tribulations Wendy as emotionally tormenting as possible. When you consistently keep the characters struggles small in scale and make it clear what's at stake for Wendy, that's you make a seemingly simple trip to the grocery store utterly harrowing. Wendy and Lucy certainly isn't an easy watch, but it's also an impressive creation well worth seeing, especially for Kelly Reichardt's work behind the camera and Michelle Williams delivering one of her very best performances.
No comments:
Post a Comment