Filmmaker Eyes The Frayed Edge Of Social Fabric

By Laura Winters
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 25, 2009

Although Kelly Reichardt's third feature film, "Wendy and Lucy," was shot a full year before the financial crash, it uncannily captures today's mood in showing the treacherous ease with which people can slide off an economic precipice.

As the film opens, Wendy (played by Michelle Williams), a young woman with a beat-up car, a small wad of cash and a beloved mutt named Lucy, arrives in a small city in Oregon. We don't know anything about her except that her car has Indiana license plates and that she is on her way to Alaska in hopes of finding a better life and steady work at the canneries.

Wendy's car breaks down and, while waiting for the garage to open, she goes to a supermarket and shoplifts dog food. She is apprehended and sent to the police station to be fingerprinted. Hours later, when she comes back to the parking lot where she left Lucy, the dog is gone. As Wendy searches frantically for Lucy, her car breaks down for good, her cash dwindles and she finds herself in a sudden free fall.

Reichardt says that the idea for the film occurred to her and co-writer Jon Raymond after Hurricane Katrina. "There was a sentiment in our country after Katrina that, if people hadn't left themselves so vulnerable, if they didn't live so precariously, they wouldn't have found themselves in that situation," Reichardt recalled during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall.

"I called Jon Raymond after hearing an interview where someone used the proverbial 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' image, and we were musing over what happens if, like Wendy, you have no safety net, you have a nothing education, you don't have family support, and certainly there's no trust fund. How do you pull yourself up by your bootstraps?"

This question is just as relevant today as post-Katrina, which is one of the reasons for the film's appeal. Made for $300,000, "Wendy and Lucy," which opens in Washington on Friday, played to acclaim at the New York and Toronto film festivals, and has been named by some critics as one of the best films of 2008.

Though she lives in New York most of the time, the 44-year-old Reichardt shot both "Wendy and Lucy" and her previous film, 2006's "Old Joy," in and around Portland, Ore. Both films are based on short stories by Raymond, who lives in Portland.

"Kelly Reichardt is one of the best things to happen to American cinema in a while," says Richard Peña, the program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. "Instead of forcing a plot, a narrative, she captures the beats and textures that go along with everyday lives. But the thing that really comes through in 'Wendy and Lucy' is that sense of being abandoned in America."

Both "Wendy and Lucy" and "Old Joy" are subtle indictments of contemporary America. "Old Joy" is about two friends (played by Daniel London and musician Will Oldham), once close, who go camping in the Oregon woods in an effort to rekindle their friendship. But the film raises deeper questions about the difficulty of living alternative lifestyles in a homogenized society.

" 'Wendy and Lucy' asks the question of what we owe each other, and what's our responsibility to each other?" says Reichardt. "Wendy is a stranger: We don't know where she came from, and people have to decide in the moment where they meet her what their obligation to her is. Or maybe there is no obligation. Is it every man for himself now?"

Though Reichardt says she is angry about the self-obsessed greed of the current era, she is equally passionate in her wish to avoid didacticism. "I like it when people have completely different takes on my films," she says several weeks after Toronto, sipping tea at her kitchen table.

When Reichardt opens her apartment door in Astoria, Queens, her dog Lucy, who stars in both "Old Joy" and "Wendy and Lucy," bounds out. Lucy is honey-colored and extremely affectionate. "Everybody who comes here takes her to the park, and she thinks you will, too," Reichardt says, laughing.

She cast Lucy in her films because "she's a great dog, but she can never be left alone." Lucy soon settles down and snores comfortably in a dog bed next to Reichardt's neat and cheerful kitchen, with its lime-green walls, checked tablecloth and view of a small park outside.

Reichardt is by turns open and guarded, admitting to being a little overwhelmed by all the media attention. She has always chosen to work in an independent and private way, with the same small group -- including Raymond and Neil Kopp, her producer.

For "Old Joy," her entire cast and crew consisted of eight people working in the Oregon woods. "Wendy and Lucy," which was shot in 18 days, involved a few more people and starred a famous actress, Williams (best-known for her role in "Brokeback Mountain" and television's "Dawson's Creek"), but it was still a tiny operation. Reichardt edited the film herself in her apartment for six months.

"Kelly's pretty resistant to typical production protocol and infrastructure," Kopp says. "The way that she works with location and camera is all very intimate. There's nobody yelling on walkie-talkies."

The filmmaker Todd Haynes ("Far From Heaven"), a friend of both Reichardt's and Williams's, was the one who suggested Williams for the role. Williams had seen and admired "Old Joy": "What I responded to was Will Oldham's performance," she says by telephone. "There were no seams at all: This guy was just living and breathing and talking, and I wanted to work like that."

Williams was also drawn to the character of Wendy. "One idea that compelled me was this idea of somebody who doesn't kick and scream and make a fuss because they're not used to it doing any good," she says. "Your life is a series of bureaucratic injustices, and there's nothing you can do about it. And I thought that was so interesting and so different from me. She feels like she's invisible: I think that's why she shoplifts, because she doesn't think anybody can see her."

To convey that sense of alienation, Williams and Reichardt decided that Williams should play Wendy in a very reined-in way.

Williams recalls, "The first scene we shot was the scene in the police station where I'm getting fingerprinted. I thought I was being subtle, but Kelly's direction was, 'You don't even have to do that much. Do less, just trust it.' And I thought, 'God, I wasn't even doing anything! What are you talking about?' But then I saw that she was wise to me."

Before each film, Reichardt insists on doing her own location-scouting, driving around with Lucy in tow. "For 'Wendy and Lucy,' I spent six months looking at the parking lots of supermarkets," she says. She depicts an America where corporate branding is banishing local color. "When I was a kid we used to do a road trip every summer from Miami to Montana," she says. "You really knew what state you were in by the radio and all these things that made each state particular. Now, between New Jersey and Laramie, Wyoming, it doesn't matter where you are, it's all the same: Taco Bell, Days Inn."

It's no accident that Reichardt's three features are all road movies (including her first feature, "River of Grass"). She is, in many ways, a wanderer: She lived for five years out of a duffel bag, sleeping on other people's couches, after she made her first film.

She was raised in Miami, the daughter of a crime-scene detective father and a narcotics-agent mother who divorced when she was 8. Reichardt was fascinated by photography from an early age, when her father let her use his crime-scene camera. She dropped out of high school and moved to Boston, where she began taking classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

She eventually received her bachelor of fine arts degree, worked in New York on various film sets, and then went back to Florida in 1993 to shoot "River of Grass," the story of a disaffected young wife and mother who tries to go on the lam but somehow can't manage to get out of town.

After that, Reichardt tried fruitlessly for many years to get a second feature made. She felt alienated, Haynes says, "by a system of filmmaking where she felt she had to play by other people's rules." To make ends meet, she began to teach, working first at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then teaching at Columbia and NYU. She currently teaches filmmaking at Bard College.

Creatively, Reichardt was saved by her decision to shoot a short film, "Ode," in North Carolina with a friend, the producer Susan Stover, and a few actors. Reichardt shot on Super 8, and Stover did the sound. "After those years of not making anything, it was a huge epiphany for me to be outside with the camera in my hand, with Susan holding a fishing pole with a mike at the end of it," Reichardt says.

"Ode" was well received, and Reichardt asked Raymond, whom she had met through Haynes, if he had any short stories they could adapt for the screen. They adapted "Old Joy," Reichardt talked her small team into giving her two weeks of their time, and the resulting film won a prize at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Reichardt and Raymond are already working on a new film, which Reichardt will describe only as a western set in 1845, "with a feminine perspective." It sounds like a departure, but Reichardt considers it to be part of a trilogy that started with "Old Joy" and continues with "Wendy and Lucy."

"We think of them all as talking about the American dream," she says. "When you're driving on your fifth day, passing your thousandth Cracker Barrel, you wonder, 'Is this what we wanted to do? Is this what we wanted it all to become?' What a loss, and what a lack of vision." She pauses.

"That's why it's so huge that Obama has gotten elected. Whatever happens, at least there's now someone trying to redefine the American dream a little bit. Maybe building some sense of community can bring people back together. Has the Me Generation finally run its course?"