Wendy and Lucy (2008)

If Night Moves (2013) was a subtle homage to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), Wendy and Lucy seems to have a debt to Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D. (1952). Perhaps the most "2008" movie that was in the can before the crash actually happened, although perhaps tied with Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler for that. What Nomadland (2020) should have been.

This interview with Kelly Reichardt is well worth reading, especially when Reichardt is questioned about 'success'.

(Roger Ebert describing the mechanic as "nice" is hilarious.)

Michelle Williams said that Wendy’s ever-present Ace bandage around her ankle was a remnant of one of her “bad ideas”—to give Wendy a limp. Reichardt had objected, said she didn’t want anything “show-offy.” And in this little anecdote lies the reason Reichardt is such a formidable auteur.

— Lauren Wissot (Slant Magazine)

[Reichardt] is unwilling to either romanticize or condescend to her characters’ self-willed marginality.

Despite a lost-dog story primed for manipulative sentimentality, Reichardt’s gracefully unfussy direction maintains consistent tonal composure, so that when Wendy finally breaks down after having a nocturnal forest run-in with a wacko [her] sobbing registers not as melodramatic hysterics but as hard-earned release.

— Nick Schager & Ed Gonzalez (Slant Magazine)

Q: You’re a dog person, I take it?

A: No, not really, I just got hung up on this one dog that I found, but I wasn’t intending to get a dog. I never saw myself as a dog person.

— Kelly Reichardt (Interview in Slant Magazine)

[Wendy] shoplifts her morning meal and cans of dog food, but she’s caught by Andy, [a] a smug teenage grocery clerk who, we learn later, must be driven to and from work via station wagon by his mother. Reichardt carefully delineates the sense of cruel superiority among those a step higher on the economic ladder.

[…]

If Wendy somehow makes the trip to Alaska, what’s there for her? A well-paying job? Affordable room and board? Earlier in the film, she meets a group of drifters, and among them is a man [who] worked at the cannery and boasts of its wages—regardless of the opportunity, he still ended up homeless and wandering. [Worse,] there’s no sense that, if the story were to continue, Wendy would return to reconnect with Lucy. She relinquishes her best friend, quite selfishly, for a futile personal ambition, and a journey for which she is woefully unprepared and tragically optimistic.

[…]

There are systems in place to ensure stray dogs have a place at night to keep them warm and fed, whereas we have no widespread institutions for humans in the same condition.

— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)

Early in the film, the teenage supermarket employee [who] busts Wendy for shoplifting won't give her a break. He's a little suckup who possibly wants to impress his boss with an unbending adherence to "store policy." Store policy also probably denies him health benefits and overtime, and if he takes a good look at Wendy, he may be seeing himself, minus the uniform with the logo and the nametag on it.

— Roger Ebert