Drawing on the margins: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy

Wendy is the stoic young woman setting out in the hopes of finding work in Alaska’s fisheries. Lucy’s her dog, and clearly by far the most beloved person in Wendy’s life. They get stalled in Oregon when their car breaks down, and with a budget that’s unforgiving of unforeseen obstacles, their journey ripped from the pages of Jack London is already in danger of a most un-romantic collapse. Wendy’s troubles are exacerbated by a run-in with the police, some unwanted attention from strange forest dwellers, and, worst of all, Lucy’s disappearance.

A girl needs to find her dog and fix her car: Wendy and Lucy is so refreshingly simple and immediate it seems almost a throwback to the task-oriented narratives of Italian neo-realism. Yet Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, which stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own pooch, is rich in atmosphere and in implications about how we live today, our fortress of ostensible prosperity, and who among us is most in danger of slipping through its cracks. Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond adapted the film from Raymond’s story ‘Train Song,’ and for all the desperation, the call of those long steel rails is indeed alluring, as are the images that recall the photography of Walker Evans or Gary Winogrand. It begins with the sounds of a tune softly hummed and a passing train. It ends with the image of a landscape blurring by.

Such elements have become Reichardt’s signature. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, about two old friends who reunite to go camping and begin to realize how time has silently betrayed their youthful ideals, also traversed the Pacific Northwest in the company of characters who exude a certain discomfort with conformity. Reichardt has a special gift for penetrating the lives of such characters with an absolute minimum of artifice. Her films, suffused with humour and subtle eccentricities—Will Patton has a marvelous supporting turn—give off a warmth, linger on the unspoken, allow us to live with these people just long enough to know something about them, to care, and likely feel troubled about where they might be heading.

Reichardt’s a teacher by profession and filmmaker by vocation. From 1994’s River of Grass through 1999’s mid-length Ode and her more recent projects, she’s worked with skeleton crews and skeletal budgets. Her sets operate more like campsites than corporations, and that’s how she likes it. The posh comforts of the hotel room where we met during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed a somewhat incongruous place to discuss such an arduous, no-frills production. But the fussiness of our surroundings fell away soon enough, and we could have just as easily been sitting round a fire in Mount Hood National Forest.

JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?

Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.


JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.

KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.

JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.

KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.


JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?

KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.

Not hi-5 nor finger-snap nor knuckle buckle nor forearm grab, The Guatemalan Handshake is hard to learn

It opens with a beguiling slow-motion plume of tire-squalled dust. It then glides through a montage of black and white expository tableau, sumptuous colour images and sonic elements that seem lovingly culled from scrapbooks for David Gordon Green’s first two movies: a little girl swinging over a river backwards through time or a demolition derby, the scenes arcing across the screen while the little girl—her name, which she’ll no doubt come to resent, is Turkeylegs—speaks through voice-over about her best friend Donald. What she says here is, in its way, crucial. There are three things Donald would like to see before he dies, Turkeylegs tells us, “a lake of chocolate, a turtle the size of a horse, and a trophy with his name on it.”

The Guatemalan Handshake unfolds in a Pennsylvania town, dividing its time between various representatives of its citizenry. The film’s catalytic event is a power surge that, in a compelling sequence, inspires a mist of varied voices that speak of malfunctioning appliances with the awe of hurricane survivors or pilgrims who’ve witnessed a miracle. Yet might the real, underlying catalyst that afflicts the characters in writer/director Todd Rohal’s feature debut be something more like a toxic spill? Judging from those reactors lingering in the background, maybe it was a nuclear accident? Something funky must have infected the water supply in these parts, because the local eccentricity meter is way into the red.

The flashback to Spank Williams’ failed public death, a grieving dog owner’s attending her own funeral, a story about Amish time travelers, a guy who sounds like he’s gonna have a coronary every time he talks, a photo of a man posing with Willie Mays and the world’s biggest chewing gum, a handicapped boy who explains that nose-picking is “awesome”—when do such bubbles of quirkiness reach critical mass? There are several inspired gags, like whenever Stool (Rich Schreiber), the movies’ most awkward date since Jackie Earle Haley, spontaneously takes off his shirt in some misguided act of foreplay—but a lot of these gags would probably work better if they weren’t all shoved into a single, heavily saturated comedy.

Rohal’s definitely gone out on a limb here, making something this unapologetically, warmly goofy, yet the goofiness rarely seems to serve much more than goofiness itself. On occasion this tack is so cartoonish that it only distances us further from the characters it purports to have affection for, like that grieving dog owner. Rohal’s story is basically a chain that links characters with accoutrements—a turtle, an electric car, a wheelchair, a headband—and a scattering of events, such as Donald’s disappearance following emotional trauma and a dog’s electrocution, or the double injury at the roller rink. Things feel most harmonious is when we get evidence of what may be Rohal’s true gift: his ability to nurture strong performances from a cast of mostly non-professionals, especially Katy Haywood, who plays Turkeylegs, and Sheila Scullin, who plays Donald’s estranged girlfriend Sadie. There’s also a very appealing performance from musician Will Oldham as Donald himself. Strikingly clean-shaven after his beardy turn in Old Joy, Oldham looks and sounds so endearingly boyish here he could’ve walked right off the set of Matewan, a movie made when he was all of 16.

The Guatemalan Handshake is threaded together by themes of paternal anxiety—manifested in a pregnant woman participating in a demolition derby and the father of her unborn child absconding—and the letting go of childish things. Yet the film itself often feels stunted, closely guarding its own preciousness, retaining each and every affectation whether they actually gel together or not. If Rohal’s next film works better than this one, it will likely be because his eccentricities are the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.

Old Joy: fleeting glimpses as feature film

It's one of those moments when the flickering image nearly becomes something else, a portal, when the audience’s perspective overlaps that of the characters’: though the car window a wild landscape passes, the characters sealed within, longing for what’s outside. Once the car’s parked, the doors opened, the invisible barrier is penetrated and the spell broken, the fluidity of steady movement replaced by awkward stumbling onto rough earth. There are these pesky moments that only touch you when passing you by.

I’m referring to moments in Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, adapted by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond from Raymond’s short story. The premise is so simple –two estranged friends reconnect for a night of camping and day-hike to a hot spring– that such reveries just bubble up from the fortitude of the atmosphere, accentuated by Yo La Tengo’s hushed score. It’s a different sort of character identification than we’re accustomed to, one entirely about implications drawn from few rather than innumerable cues.

The friends are Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, whose music shares a particular kinship with Reichardt’s vision). Both are in their late 30s, with the period of their lives in which they could easily relate to one and other clearly far behind them. Mark has more or less settled into grown-up life in Portland, Oregon. We first see him attempting half-convincing yogic meditation when he gets the surprise invitation from Kurt, resulting in disapproving glares from his very pregnant wife.

Mark’s reserved, perhaps uncomfortable. Kurt effortlessly assumes control of the conversation once on the road. He’s a lonely, non-committal, restless spirit with vaguely New Age tendencies, still sniffing around for some elusive satori that convention advises is best found in our 20s. Gradually Kurt’s nervousness hints at a deeper, long-simmering panic. He confesses that this trip was intended to rekindle their friendship, though once the words leave his mouth it’s obvious such hopes are in vain.

I’m told the film’s title refers to a Chinese proverb. It slips into the film’s spare dialogue as Kurt recounts a strange, affecting dream. That Old Joy seems founded in proverb, in a piece of wisdom honed down to something both essential and multifaceted, seems appropriate, directing us toward a reading of the film that might do justice to its measure of depth in tone and feeling.

There were more than 10 years between Reichardt’s debut feature River of Grass and this, her follow-up. (In between was a short entitled ‘Ode,’ with music by Oldham.) I’ve no idea what Reichardt did in the meantime, but there’s something curiously satisfying in the fact that she’s waited so long to –in the literal sense– say so little. Old Joy’s only 76 minutes long, distinguished by a dearth of narrative events, and feels utterly out of time, an accumulation of details and feelings more than a story. Yet I don’t think there’s a single moment that doesn’t hold the glow from the filaments at the film’s core.

Reichardt lets things play out in a way that’s pointed, poetic and maybe not as dire as it first seems. After parting ways with Mark, Kurt appears unnervingly aimless on a nocturnal urban street, passing some change onto a homeless guy as an act of fleeting communion, or way to stave off fear of eventually winding up in the same place. The camera swings off into the street that gives way to the darkness on the edge of town and the title suddenly appears, abandoning Kurt but leaving him very much alive in the closing moments of this quiet film that only grows in meaning and beauty after its over.