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Superheroes and superstars alike are conspicuously absent from Kelly Reichardt's meditative Wendy and Lucy, an independent film whose throwaway budget of $200,000 would not be enough to pay for an intern's cup of coffee on the set of Watchmen. The director employed her own dog, a Golden Retriever named Lucy, for the co-starring role; Lucy's human co-star is played, with tremulous optimism, by Michelle Williams. Her character, Wendy Carroll, is a young single woman, with a windblown helmet haircut, plaid shirts, a money belt, a notebook in which she records her limited expenses, and an old Honda Accord which she hopes will transport Lucy and her from their hometown of Muncie, Illinois to southeast Alaska, where she has heard they need workers in the salmon canneries. When Wendy's car gives up the ghost in a small Oregon town, her life falls apart as well-the movie does anything but. In tiny increments, this film records the many ways a life at odds with the universe can survive, just. 

Wendy is a windblown speck across the horizon, a forgotten shadow (when she calls home from a pay phone, her sister is suspicious that she is up to something); she is a stick figure, not because of any lack of character as written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond (his short story "Train Choir" was the inspiration for the movie), but rather because that is her character: she is not bursting at the seams with "personality," the way most contemporary movies and fiction insist upon these days, i.e., the overloaded characters in Rachel Gets Married, where people are always doing something. Wendy simply lives: if her dilemmas-the Honda needs work, she gets into minor trouble with the law, Lucy disappears-seem small-time, as they apparently do for many impatient viewers, the point is to feel what she is feeling, as much as she is able. 

This beautifully composed Zen film does not work up to a summing-up scene of enlightenment-the kind of epiphany built up to in, say, Satyajit Ray's Indian movies or the final frozen image of The 400 Blows-but the moviegoer who is able to go along with this film about solitude and hope in the distance will not be let down. The director does not punish her, the way recent French movies have seemed to attack their female characters; Reichardt clearly cares about Wendy (and Lucy), and gives her an inner strength (she hums to herself) more believable than any tortured fantasy character with fancy-shmancy powers.
 
Wendy and Lucy shimmers with the kind of unforced intimacy that Altman showed in many of his best pictures. The scenes are not framed for Oscar moments, nor are there necessarily one scene that the entire movie can be wrapped around. Reichardt's 2006 movie, the equally quiet Old Joy, focused on two old friends who drive off for the weekend, discussing and reminiscing, over which time each character reveals himself. In this movie, the focus is singularly on Wendy, and the camera tracks her movements without judgment; when spoken to, Wendy seems to need to take in the attention first before responding. Michelle Williams-this is her finest performance-hardly acts, or acts sparingly: she cocks her head, stares into the distance, gives nothing away. Yet it is precisely in her understated performance, like Shelly Duvall's in the first half of Altman's 3 Women when her newly arrived character tries to break into the local apartment singles scene only to be humiliated, that recalls his great-hearted affinity for actors and for letting them shape their own creations. With Altman's passing, there is a huge void in American pictures; there is no one to express the afflictions and benedictions of daily life, whether in a comedy or a Western setting or even a farce. Altman worked from Nature, and Kelly Reichardt has a similar expressiveness.

The film runs a bare hour and twenty minutes, yet there is nothing threadbare about it. Wendy's problems are answered, occasionally, by the various townspeople (Will Patton, probably the movie's other biggest name, plays a sympathetic auto mechanic). As Wendy wanders through the town's empty parking lots and deserted side streets-framed, ingeniously, by picture postcard mountains and tall trees which seem to offer sanctuary but appear to be too far to ever reach-the movie's theme emerges. Characters are defined by what they do: supermarket stocker, mechanic, police officer: along comes Wendy, who does not fit into any category. What should be done about her? If there is one scene that seems to have been shot for pointed attention it comes midway when Wendy talks with an older, gentlemanly Walgreens security guard. She says, "You can't get a job without an address," and he replies, "You can't get an address without an address. You can't get a job without a job. It's all fixed." The kōan-like quality of the security guard's conversation is not meant as a bluff, the way a European filmmaker would use it as a provocation. Reichardt and her co-writer are searching for a path to-something. In Wendy's interactions with the car mechanic and the security guard (played delicately by Walter Dayton) who helps her out after Lucy is found, the unsaid things matter most: there is no Wi-Fi in the film to ease the matter of encountering other people.

Reichardt works with her camera like a writer: she knows intuitively when an image speaks a thousand words, which explains the spareness of her screenplay. Michelle Williams's dialogue is less consequential than her presence onscreen, especially when it concerns Lucy. If certain scenes register still-life elegance, it is not the studied brilliance of Terrence Malick's landscapes but something closer to looking out the window from a traveling car or bus: beauty can be framed by the most ordinary means. It never lasts, but there is always another image to be discovered. In that sense of the faded past admixed with a blank future Wendy and Lucy is the most real American movie of the past few years. Wendy is present at all times, never more than in the final scenes, heartbreaking yet, yes, imbued with the spirit of the American dream that most American art (and audiences, too) yielded to nothing long ago.

Now Showing
Tivoli Cinemas
Westport Manor Square, 4050 Pennsylvania, KCMO. 
Visit www.tivolikc.com or call 913-383-7756 for showtimes.

Glenwood Arts
9575 Metcalf
Overland Park
Visit www.fineartsgroup.com or call 913-642-4404 for showtimes 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.