Wendy and Lucy is a heart-wrenching, tragic look at the human strays of society, the people who have either left the mainstream on their own or who we have left behind in our general pursuit of the American dream. What happens to the people who fall through the economic and social cracks? Where do the drifters and the unemployed go when there are fewer and fewer places for them? And when they get lost, who finds them and gives them a good home and safety? Michelle Williams gives one of the best performances of 2008 in Kelly Reichardt's acclaimed slice of social realism, a beautiful follow-up to Old Boy and a film that will be beloved by most of the arthouse audience for which it has been targeted.

Williams plays the Wendy of the title, a young woman with no attachments outside of her traveling companion, her dog Lucy. She is a traveler, a woman who does her best to clean herself in dirty, gas station bathrooms, sleeps in the park, and takes odd jobs to make ends meet. When most people deal with the common tragedies that life has a way of dealing us in waves, they have support structures built of friends, family, and finances to fall back on. What happens when a string of bad luck hits a woman like Wendy?

Wendy’s tragic run starts with the breakdown of her beat-up car, the transport that was supposed to take this optimistic young woman to Alaska for a potentially lucrative summer job. With barely any money to her name, Wendy is forced to make a tough decision and decides to shoplift to feed her dog. She gets caught and leaves Lucy tied up in front of the store. When she returns, the beautiful pooch is gone and Wendy struggles for the rest of the movie to find her. It doesn’t end in the way you might expect from a Hollywood movie with the same set-up, but it ends perfectly.

Wendy and Lucy is clearly a simple story but that's what makes it so consistently riveting. Most of us are faced with difficult financial decisions on a regular basis, with increasingly frequency in today’s economic crisis, but those decisions aren't usually made this close to the fringe of homelessness or starvation. The deeply poor, the people who sleep in their car and steal to feed their dog, have rarely been as realistically represented as they are in Wendy and Lucy and that fact alone makes the film worth seeing. We can all see ourselves or someone we know just a few decisions or a few bad days away from the life of Wendy.

What makes it even better than "worth seeing" is the shockingly good performance by Michelle Williams. The former star of Dawson's Creek has been good before, particularly in Brokeback Mountain and Dick, but she's incredible here, robbed for an Oscar nomination in last week's announcements. She knows that she can't overplay Wendy's situation and never turns her character into the manipulative, heart-string puller that so many other actresses would have attempted with the same material. Williams was tasked with grounding her character and the entire film in the real world, not turning it into a TV movie or a statement on all of the poor people struggling to feed themselves and the dog. And she nails it. She is heartbreaking by being genuine and her final moments in the film are among the ones that I will remember most vividly from 2008 (the film was released for awards consideration in NY/LA in 2008 and is only now being rolled out around the rest of the country).

If Wendy and Lucy has a flaw, it's that it's a bit too short. I wanted to spend a bit more time with Wendy and Lucy, but that's a sign of Reichardt's skill as a writer and director. She makes it easy to believe that both of these characters exist before and after the camera rolled. It only makes sense that our window into their lives would feel all too brief. Wendy and Lucy is a glimpse at a portion of society rarely captured so eloquently or heartbreakingly on film. Don't miss it.

Rating: THREE AND A HALF BONES

 Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: January 30^th, 2009

Rating: R

Starring: Michelle Williams, Will Patton, Will Oldham, John Robinson, Wally Dalton, and Larry Fessenden

Director: Kelly Reichardt

Writers: Jonathan Raymond & Kelly Reichardt