Every line of dialogue (not spoken to a dog) is shrouded by a haze of mutual unintelligibility in Kelly Reinhart’s Wendy and Lucy. Word becomes unbearable sentence becomes lost cars and lost loves in this 2008 meditation on economic subjugation.
The film asks us to see how being poor erodes the shared language between humans. Wendy, who spends three nights in three increasingly precarious locales of a small Oregonian suburb, is frustratingly inexpressive in her desperation, which is not an indictment of Michelle Williams’ performance. Rather, it’s to her credit, as the close-lipped characterization of Wendy reveals a dark secret about economic (non-)participation that the rest of the movie comes to demonstrate: “the whole thing’s fixed.”
At least, so says the Walgreen beat cop, a well-meaning (lends phone) but deeply clueless (hands Wendy $7 dollars) ally of Wendy’s in her search to recover Lucy and continue her journey on to Alaska to find work. “You can’t get a job without a job,” the two agree.
But it’s more than that.
Every line of dialogue between Wendy and another character is so mired in misunderstanding that every line of dialogue is phyisically painful. White, working-class Americans are too obsessed with rules and their repurcussions—i.e. for 1) sleeping in a parking lot, 2) charging a fine, or 3) stealing a dog treat—that they essentially can’t communicate with Wendy. Characters, including our beat cop, are all quick to lend advice about “the right thing to do,” not realizing those “right things” are impossible for Wendy to access. Even her phone conversation with her sister and her sister’s husband is excruciating in the lack of understanding. The husband, having learned of Wendy’s car troubles, is unable to meaningfully understand the direness of Wendy’s situation, simply stating “everything is okay,” as if trying to convince himself.
Why doesn’t Wendy speak up to get help? What language can she communicate in? She embodies the independence and motivation of the American ideal, but is unable to communicate with it in any meaningful way. Even her interactions with public spaces are wrong. She showers in a 7-11 and lovingly runs her hands across the metal lip of a grocery store refrigerator. Shot framing emphasizes her discomfort or her foreigness in taken-for-granted locations of American life.
She can’t fill out the forms at the dog pound without an adress. She is an alien to the mechanic’s office. In the final scenes of the movie, she stands just over the fence from her sole companion in the world, seeing Lucy happy and healthy in the backyard of an old man whom she calls “so nice.” It would seem that even a dog can find it’s way back into society. Wendy is still on the outside. She promises to come back, after having made some money.
It has led Wendy to resigning herself to the fact that, regardless of the appellant “better side of humanity,” there’s just no way to climb back on the economic ladder, “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” and, in doing so, to recover a shared language with the rest of “civil” society.
“Don’t be a nusiance,” Wendy tells Lucy before losing her forever.
P.S. The movie has a Heaven vs. Hell reading, and Wendy is somewhere in between the two. A Lost soul. The druggies and the crazy man in the woods are demons of the darkness