Wendy and Lucy
Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Written by Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt; based on the short story "Train Choir" by Jonathan Raymond. With Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Wally Dalton, Will Oldham, and Lucy the Dog. (R)
Wendy and Lucy, the new film from the director of Old Joy, is profoundly quiet and quietly profound. It tells a tiny story and an enormous one—they are the same story—and, like life itself, can seem to go by slowly until many small decisions culminate in one moment when everything changes. Many people will not like it.
Wendy (Michelle Williams) is a young woman traveling to Alaska with her dog Lucy; she talks vaguely about finding work in the fisheries, but doesn't seem to have a concrete plan. "I hear they need people up there," she says, and that seems reason enough. Slowly drifting northwest—away from her estranged family—her car breaks down in Oregon. Before long, so will she.
Williams, who is onscreen for almost the entire film, is almost unrecognizable as Wendy. Partly she's helped along by a pitch-perfect wardrobe and hair; the cut-off trousers, plaid shirt and hooded sweatshirt are topped off with a boyish haircut, blunting the sharp edge of the actress' natural glamour. But mostly, it's nothing but her acting chops, and she's able to hold our attention even when she's doing little but walking around a dying town, calling to her missing dog.
Those who don't enjoy Wendy and Lucy will likely find fault with those scenes, and with the film's general disdain for much of conventional moviemaking. The soundtrack is little more than Wendy's occasional humming, which, of course, is an entirely appropriate soundtrack for a lost woman alone in the woods. Perhaps more telling, they may find fault with Wendy herself, for taking the course of action that leads to Lucy's disappearance. The resolution to that particular problem is at once unavoidably obvious but immediately heartbreaking, and as the credits roll the feeling is that any one of us could be in a similar spot someday soon.
Thankfully, director Reichardt refuses the sentimental, even when it's there for the taking, as in Wendy's tentative, gentle connection to an aging security guard who rousts her from sleep early in the film. When, later, he makes a gesture of aid, it rings true—heartfelt, but necessarily small. In an era when theaters are showing at least two movies about mall-cop hijinks, films like this are a bracing, welcome tonic.
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Several friends of mine became parents during the past year, and seeing them grow as mothers and fathers has been a great experience. But it's hard to say if a viewing of Consuming Kids would be a welcome eye-opener about how America's corporate marketers target children, or if it would be the sort of thing that might tempt them to lock their kids away for a few decades.
In the wake of Reagan-era deregulation, the developing mind became the new favorite playground of marketers, who became adept at using child psychology and advances in neuroscience to push everything from video games and sugary snacks to high-priced items well beyond the wallets of the average grade-schooler. Seizing on the "nag factor" that is any child's best offense, marketers began an effort to sneak through the back door—instead of trying to sell directly to jaded parents, they wanted kids to do the dirty work. Peanut butter and jelly in the same jar is just the start of it. At the other end are pitches and products—the tobacco industry's late Joe Camel, for instance—that are effectively warping the minds and bodies of our nation's youth in pursuit of "cradle to grave" brand loyalty.
Presented in its Valley premiere at 7:30 p.m. this Friday at Northampton's Academy of Music, the film (its chilling subtitle is "The Commercialization of Childhood") is a homegrown affair produced by the Media Education Foundation, headquartered just around the corner. The one-night-only screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion featuring author Susan Linn, children's advocate and Motherhood Project director Enola Aird, and the producers of the film. Appropriately, proceeds from the screening will benefit the Northampton Public Schools' Arts Enrichment Programs and the Northampton Arts Council's KidsBestFest.
Amherst Cinema continues its Shakespeare in Film! series with Sunday and Thursday showings of Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film Henry V. While earlier versions of the play tended to gloss over some of the story's darker moments in favor of a theatrical restraint, Branagh's take is grittier, more physical, shot through with streaks of the blood and filth that oil the gears of war. The full title of the play runs: The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France. Loosely translated: it's a war movie.
Branagh, who also appears in the title role, is joined by a Who's Who of British actors including Judi Dench, Ian Holm, Emma Thompson and Robbie Coltrane, as well as a teenaged Christian Bale, who grew up to be Batman. The Sunday afternoon screening will feature an introduction and discussion by Arthur F. Kinney, Director of the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Nathaniel Leonard, Associate Director of the Renaissance Center Theater Company.
The Pioneer Valley Jewish Film and Arts Festival continues this week, bringing an assortment of art events to the region. Among its film offerings is Fugitive Pieces, a 2008 drama from director Jeremy Podeswa (whose TV work includes stints lensing Nip/Tuck and The Tudors). The story of a life fractured by a wartime horror, it follows a writer's journey from Canada to Greece as he attempts to reassemble the shattered history of his own family. James E. Young, Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at UMass-Amherst will give a lecture to accompany the screening.
After winning a string of film awards in Europe, the comedy Max Minsky and Me arrives at Agawam Family Cinema this Sunday. A teen comedy, it shows that some kinds of films have no national boundaries—in this case, the kind that throws together an unlikely pair and watches them come to a kind of appreciation for each other. The odd couple here are Max and Nelly; he's a basketball star, she's a budding astronomer who enlists his help in meeting Edouard, Prince of Luxembourg, himself an amateur stargazer. A note to those averse to people talking in theaters: in what is perhaps a first, local actor Cate Damon is slated to read the subtitles aloud during the screening.
The same afternoon, John Frankenheimer's (The Manchurian Candidate) 1968 film The Fixer comes to the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst. Based on Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—itself based on a deplorable incident in Russian history—the film stars Alan Bates as Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman (a "fixer") living in Tsarist Russia. When a Christian boy is killed during the Passover holiday, the flames of anti-Jewish sentiment rise, and Bok is arrested on suspicion of murder. John Clayton, a retired professor of English at UMass-Amherst and author of Kuperman's Fire, will host a talk at the screening.
On Wednesday, the wonderfully titled Leon The Pig Farmer screens in Agawam. Already something of a cult sensation overseas, where it was made by Monty Python player Eric Idle's production company, it's a comedy about a particularly Jewish identity crisis. The trouble begins when 20-something Leon Geller discovers that his birth was the result of artificial insemination. It gets a little more troublesome when his research uncovers the fact that he's actually the son of Yorkshire pig farmer. All in all, it's quite a kosher pickle.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.