Wendy and Lucy

If you’ve ever been homeless or have lost your dog, watching this movie might move you to tears. But I think it’s more likely that you’ll be bored to them.

Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her dog Lucy are traveling to Alaska in search of a new life, with little more than a car and a handful of possessions. The car breaks down in a small Oregonian town, which is the first event in a series of bad luck and worse decisions for Wendy. She ties up Lucy outside a supermarket then gets caught shoplifting inside. After being released from jail, to her horror she discovers that her dog is gone. The rest of the picture is a bleak affair, chronicling the search for Lucy and Wendy’s struggles to survive in a foreign place with no money.

This is a tough film to sit through. Wendy seemingly has no friends and has an estranged relationship with her sister. When Lucy disappears, she’s got nothing left. There’s very little in the way of plot, which wouldn’t matter so much if Wendy were more developed. Her daily actions of endurance are fascinating to watch, but it’s very difficult to care for the character. We never find out why she left home, why she has those mysterious bandages, or why she is so hard on her luck. We don’t learn anything about Wendy’s personally either; she’s broken to the point of being a void. Her back-story is left purposefully ambiguous, but that becomes a big hindrance for the audience’s emotional investment.

This feels like one of those films you’re almost required to like as a critic. It’s “arty,” and minimalistic, but it tries too hard. Or maybe it doesn’t try hard enough. Wendy isn’t enough of a character for the film to be much of a character study. And without giving anything away, the conclusion to the film left me underwhelmed and not emotionally attached at all. This film is meant to evoke empathy for homeless and others in tough financial times. But that’s a pretty hard task when you’ve got a ghost of protagonist.

- Eschew It