Wendy and Lucy

Kelly Reichardt’s poetic road drama WENDY AND LUCY stars Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, premiered to great acclaim in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film follows Wendy Carroll (Williams), who is driving to Ketchikan, Alaska, in hopes of a summer of lucrative work at the Northwestern Fish cannery, and the start of a new life with her dog, Lucy. When her car breaks down in Oregon, however, the thin fabric of her financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and her dog.

WENDY AND LUCY addresses issues of sympathy and generosity at the edges of American life, revealing the limits and depths of people’s duty to each other in tough times. Williams has already garnered critics’ attention for her haunting performance, as she conveys “an inexorable sense of longing for something more than life has given her.” (Scott Foundas, Variety).

Reichardt — “one of the few masters now working in American independent film” (Larry Gross, Film Comment) — previously directed OLD JOY (2006) and RIVER OF GRASS (1994), which each premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, with OLD JOY earning the VPRO Tiger Award for Best Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Now, with WENDY AND LUCY, Reichardt has made “palpably, tragically real what it means to be struggling at the very edge of the economic abyss…with uninflected realism, an attentive camera and no weeping strings.” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).

Based on Jonathan Raymond’s short story Train Choir, WENDY AND LUCY also features Walter Dalton, Will Oldham, Larry Fessenden, John Robinson and Will Patton.

“Exemplary because of its strong sense of place and its commitment to exploring the hard facts of American life without sentimentality or message-mongering, in a way that is rare in American movies. But “Wendy and Lucy” stands a bit apart from other movies like it because of the participation of Michelle Williams. She can’t help being a movie star, even if her portrayal of a young woman adrift in the Pacific Northwest is marked by an authenticity that challenges conventional notions of film acting.” (A.O. Scott, New York Times)