Wendy is the stoic young woman setting out in the hopes of finding work in Alaska’s fisheries. Lucy’s her dog, and clearly by far the most beloved person in Wendy’s life. They get stalled in Oregon when their car breaks down, and with a budget that’s unforgiving of unforeseen obstacles, their journey ripped from the pages of Jack London is already in danger of a most un-romantic collapse. Wendy’s troubles are exacerbated by a run-in with the police, some unwanted attention from strange forest dwellers, and, worst of all, Lucy’s disappearance.
A girl needs to find her dog and fix her car: Wendy and Lucy is so refreshingly simple and immediate it seems almost a throwback to the task-oriented narratives of Italian neo-realism. Yet Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, which stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own pooch, is rich in atmosphere and in implications about how we live today, our fortress of ostensible prosperity, and who among us is most in danger of slipping through its cracks. Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond adapted the film from Raymond’s story ‘Train Song,’ and for all the desperation, the call of those long steel rails is indeed alluring, as are the images that recall the photography of Walker Evans or Gary Winogrand. It begins with the sounds of a tune softly hummed and a passing train. It ends with the image of a landscape blurring by.
Such elements have become Reichardt’s signature. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, about two old friends who reunite to go camping and begin to realize how time has silently betrayed their youthful ideals, also traversed the Pacific Northwest in the company of characters who exude a certain discomfort with conformity. Reichardt has a special gift for penetrating the lives of such characters with an absolute minimum of artifice. Her films, suffused with humour and subtle eccentricities—Will Patton has a marvelous supporting turn—give off a warmth, linger on the unspoken, allow us to live with these people just long enough to know something about them, to care, and likely feel troubled about where they might be heading.
Reichardt’s a teacher by profession and filmmaker by vocation. From 1994’s River of Grass through 1999’s mid-length Ode and her more recent projects, she’s worked with skeleton crews and skeletal budgets. Her sets operate more like campsites than corporations, and that’s how she likes it. The posh comforts of the hotel room where we met during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed a somewhat incongruous place to discuss such an arduous, no-frills production. But the fussiness of our surroundings fell away soon enough, and we could have just as easily been sitting round a fire in Mount Hood National Forest.
JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?
Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.
JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.
KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.
JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.
KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.
JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?
KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.
JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?
Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.
JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.
KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.
JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.
KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.
JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?
KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment