A Moment of Desperation

Understated 'Wendy and Lucy' Searches for One Lost Dog, One Lost Soul

We experience movies as light and motion, but we remember them in moments: A match being blown out and turning into the Sahara ("Lawrence of Arabia"). A ruined Chaplin smiling at the end of "City Lights." Scarlett O'Hara waving a root vegetable over her head.

Each of us has our own moments, of course, and they play back in major and minor keys. Although it received awards, acclaim and well-earned praise, "Brokeback Mountain" had one melancholy scene that seemed to define it: When Michelle Williams's character, Alma, sees her husband kiss another man, her face becomes a map into fear, loathing and a collapsing future. It was a devastating emotional miniature, and it marked an actress's ability to linger on. And on.

"Wendy and Lucy," too, is a miniature, a purposefully, deliberately spartan tone poem of need and desperation -- and, no surprise, a piquant metaphor for the whole society. And it stars Williams in a role that is one long moment.

Wendy is trying to make her underfinanced way from Indiana to Alaska, because she has a vague promise of work in a fish-packing plant. Despite Williams's surface spunkiness -- her pixie hair and cutoff pants imply a vague attempt at style -- Wendy's battered self-respect is something that seems to await many of us, just around the next downhill corner on the economic road to ruin. She is most definitely us. When her Honda breaks down (is director Kelly Reichardt saying she should have bought American?), she becomes the prey of an unscrupulous garage mechanic (Will Patton). She's befriended by an initially wary security guard (Walter Dalton), who lends her his cellphone -- temporarily ameliorating the cruel, smug world.

Faced with repair bills she can't possibly pay, Wendy steals some beef jerky and dog food, and she becomes the victim of a store employee who is wearing a crucifix and mantle of comfortable self-righteousness: "If a person can't afford dog food, they shouldn't have a dog!" He will later be picked up from work by his parents, while Wendy searches desperately for that dog she can't afford, who has disappeared while she's been under arrest.

It's the loss of Lucy, more than anything else, that brings Wendy closest to the edge. But the missing dog also saves her humanity: There's nothing like suffering to make one self-absorbed, but Wendy remains contained because she has something, someone, to worry about. And whether Lucy represents Wendy's ego, soul or just her self-respect, the pup is a four-legged metaphor.

As with her previous feature, "Old Joy" (2006), Reichardt adapted "Wendy and Lucy" from a story by Jonathan Raymond and shot it in the Pacific Northwest, where many timeless qualities (like poverty) can find a home. She has become a critics' darling because of her understated, well-wrought, minimalist approach to her art. And yet, for all its virtues, "Wendy and Lucy" seems like the most overrated of art movies.

Yes, it's obscure and distancing and makes you pay attention. All good. It's made a lot of top 10 lists -- so for those who need their opinions validated, there's plenty of good company. And Williams's performance is nuanced, moving and well worth any awards she might collide with this season. But Wendy is also anonymous. We are provided almost nothing about her background -- there is a phone call to her sister's home for help, which is rebuffed. But otherwise she could be anyone and her circumstances anyone's.

Which, of course, is Reichardt's point. But are the economically distressed defined strictly by their circumstances? Is poverty really just a condition? Such an approach deprives Wendy, already deprived of almost everything else, a narrative, something that would make her singular, and incontrovertibly human. We get the whole point. We just don't get the whole woman.

Wendy and Lucy (80 minutes, at Landmark's E Street Cinema ) is rated R for vulgarity.