by DAVID KERN

In 2006, indie director/auteur Kelly Reichardt released, to much critical acclaim, a low budget film called Old Joy, about two friends on a weekend camping trip. Together, these men and their dog wander through the Cascade Mountains of the Great Northwest, setting aside, for a time, the pressures and conflicts of everyday life. It’s a simple film really, as becomes Ms. Reichardt’s style, but for all its narrative simplicity and low budget production values, it is complicated psychologically and emotionally. It asks tough questions, leaves answers up to the viewer, and, like most great minimalist films, is a voyeuristic pleasure, allowing the audiences to watch carefully, listen closely and experience fully the lives of the characters.

The same can be said for Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, a gem of a film released, also to much acclaim, in 2008. Here Reichardt’s camera follows a twenty-something girl from the Midwest named Wendy as she, and her dog Lucy, travel westward to find work in Alaska. Like many Americans, Wendy, played with heartbreaking brilliance by Michelle Williams, is struggling to survive financially and her hope is that Alaska will offer new hope. But the road is proving to be of no more comfort to her than her Indiana home. When she arrives in a small Oregon town in the film’s opening scenes she has very little money, a broken down car and a weary body. Not surprisingly, one thing leads to another and Lucy goes missing. The majority of the film follows Wendy as she searches for her lost friend. This is a truly moving film - one of the very best of ‘08 in fact - and deserves to be seen and enjoyed by a wide audience across the U.S.

But it probably won’t be seen because it’s not an easy film to watch. It’s not filled with car chases or fight scenes or sex (if you find such things easy to watch). Its not glamorous or even didactic. But it speaks loud and clear to, and about, the Times In Which We Live. Like Wendy and Lucy, we’re all moving in some direction, searching for something, longing for something. Wendy and Lucy speaks profoundly and compassionately to the many Americans who have lost their jobs, or homes, or vehicles, who are searching and longing; it speaks of the pervading sense of hopelessness so tragically prevalent across this - or any - country. But it also speaks to humanity’s common inbred desire for relationship and community and love, the common desire to be in motion, to be changing, to avoid becoming static, the human desire and ability to counter material lack with relational plenty: the human capacity to do good in hard times.

Wendy and Lucy is a heartbreaking and hopeful and tragic and beautiful film, a lovely poem to the common man, an ode to broken dreams.

But Reichardt is not alone in saying these things. On both films, her writing partner has been novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond. In fact, the screenplays of each film were based on short stories Raymond penned first.

Jonathan was kind enough to spend some time chatting with me about dog people, minimalist film making (and screenwriting) and the process of creating meaningful characters. Here’s what he had to say:

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ITH. So how did you get involved in this film and how did you get involved with Kelly Reichardt?

JR. I met Kelly through our mutual friend, the incomparable Todd Haynes, and at some point after that she read a novel I wrote called The Half-Life, which she liked. She was looking for a new project at the time and asked me if I had any short stories that might be adaptable, and I showed her one called Old Joy, which, incredibly, she made into a feature starring Daniel London and Will Oldham. It was during that process that we started talking about a subsequent movie, and that became Wendy and Lucy.

ITH. What was the inspiration for the story?

JR. The inspiration came from a lot of places. In some ways it started in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It also was inspired by films of Italian Neorealists like Vittorio de Sica, in particular Umberto D. It also came, for my part, from just gradually growing to understand how much people really love their dogs.

ITH. Do you have a dog?

JR. I do not. I’m not really a dog person. I am, however, I’ve found over the years, a dog-person-person. I really like people who like dogs. They’re the best people, by far.

ITH. It’s interesting that you mention de Sica because I found that, as I watched Wendy and Lucy, I was reminded of his amazing film, The Bicycle Thief, in which a man and his son wander the streets of Rome in search of a stolen bike. In that film, the bike is representative of opportunity and of hope (or the lack thereof) - at least that’s how I read it. In your film, would you say that Lucy, the dog, is similarly representative of hope? She is, after all, about all that Wendy has left.

JR. That’s probably fair to say. Although, honestly, I never thought of Lucy in very abstract terms. I just thought of her as Wendy’s best friend and confidante.

ITH. It seems that many writers - whether novelists or screenwriters (or both) - respond to such questions that same way. In other words, to many writers, the characters they create are just people, like you and I. They don’t seem to attach some kind of abstract meaning to them. Would you say that doing so, attaching abstractions to characters, is problematic for the writing process? Does it deter from actually being able to breathe life into the people you are creating? Does that make sense?

JR. I guess it’s a balancing act in the end, probably. Hopefully characters do carry some ideas with them, and come to represent certain positions in one’s mind, but it’s also nice if they can surprise you sometimes, too.

ITH. Wendy and Lucy is a great example of minimalist film making at its best. Much of the film involves just one character and little verbal dialogue and it certainly doesn’t make use of extravagant special effects or a large budget. In fact, from time to time, the film simply follows Miss Williams as she walks with her dog. From a screenwriter’s perspective, constructing a screenplay for a film with minimal dialogue must have been a challenge. In whats ways does this style of film making challenge a screenwriter? And in what ways does it help in the screenwriting process?

JR. Well, I wrote it as a story first (just published in a book called Livability). So a lot of those walking sequences in the movie correspond to descriptions of things and to internal thoughts that the character is experiencing. I think for a movie as quiet as this one, having those paragraphs was helpful for the people on set.

ITH. When you were writing the screenplay did you have a specific actress in mind? Did you know Michelle Williams would be playing the lead? If not, did you do many re-writes for her?

JR. I didn’t have anyone in mind when I was writing the story. By the time the adaptation began, Michelle was probably on board. But it didn’t entail any rewriting. Maybe a tiny change in physical description.

ITH. I think Miss Williams performance was one of the best of the year, one of the really underrated performances, unfortunately. What was it like working with her and how do you feel that she managed in capturing effectively the ideas that you were trying get across in your script?

JR. I didn’t really work with her directly, but I agree she did an amazing job. To me, the incredible thing she accomplished, and which I can only imagine is like the black belt of acting, was somehow to express the idea that she was, in fact, withholding expression. Somehow, she managed to give the impression of blocked feelings, which to me seems almost impossible. How do you express that you are not expressing something? It seems really hard.

ITH. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think that because of that it’s really hard to actually get to know Wendy. She is so withdrawn, we know no more about her than any of the other characters in the film do. She’s just as much a drifter to us as she is to say, the security guard at the Walgreens who helps her out. But, like him, we feel for her, empathize with her situation. Was the decision to not reveal much about her past a purposeful one? And if so, why did you feel that you could effectively garner the audience’s empathy and compassion for her?

JR. There is a back-story, but it’s not very interesting. She got into some bad debt, basically. The outline of her story isn’t so different from that of a lot of other people. It’s funny, this idea has come up before, that she’s somehow sympathetic despite her unforthcoming qualities. I’ve never really understood the idea that you need to know a lot about a person before you can start to sympathize with them, though. I mean, I don’t know that much about the pasts of some good friends of mine. Or members of my own family, for that matter. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling for them. I think there’s a critical fallacy at work in the idea that backstory is the avenue to audience “identification,” whatever that is. If the person registers, and they’re dealing with recognizable issues, I think we can fill in the blanks for ourselves.

ITH. So then, in creating this Wendy character, what did you do to try to make her “register”? I mean, in some ways I suspect that this is a film that is a product of its time - as you implied when you mentioned Hurricane Katrina as an inspiration for the story - and resonates with viewers because of the times we are now experiencing. Someone struggling with finances is a common theme in today’s America. But were there purposeful things you incorporated into her character that would make her more likable or that at least would enhance the viewers sympathy for her? I understand that sometimes characters are who they are and they take on lives of their own aside from your pen or keyboard or whatever, but as a screenwriter did you add anything to make her more likable?

JR. I don’t think there was much effort to make her likable. If anything, the opposite. The danger was that she becomes some chaste vessel of downtroddenness, or something. Some pure innocent caught in the machine. I don’t think anyone wants to root a person like that. Much more interesting to identify with someone a little damaged or mean. So if there was an effort, it was toward making her a little more impatient, a little more judgmental. It’s probably more recognizable on the page, though.

ITH. Throughout the film, we hear Wendy whistling as she walks, whistling some really lovely but tragic sounding tunes, melancholy if you will. Was this in the screenplay or was it an idea devised by the director or even Miss Williams?

JR. I think that was Kelly’s idea. And the tune is written by Will Oldham. It’s also picked up in the muzak in the grocery store, an orchestrated version by Smokey Hormel, I believe.

ITH. Tell us a little about your fiction, in case anybody who enjoyed the film is interested in checking it out. Who would you claim as influences? Where can we find it? Etc.

JR. Let’s see. I’ve got two books out in the world now. The first is a novel called The Half-Life, probably still available on Amazon and such. The second is Livability, in stores now, a story collection including the pieces that led to Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Both books are involved in depicting the landscape and history of the Pacific Northwest (the novel even includes fur trappers and such) and might fall generally under the category of what people call realism, for what that’s worth. One writer I’ve looked to as a kind of inspiration is Sherwood Anderson, I guess. Winesburg, Ohio is a book I go back to.

To find out more about Wendy and Lucy head over to the film’s official site.

David Kern is the Editor-in-Chief of Into the Hill. You can reach him at david@intothehill.com

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 1:33 am and is filed under Film Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.