Short Takes
- A Girl and Her Dog Michelle Williams
WENDY AND LUCY A small, subtle heartbreaker told with forthright simplicity, Kelly Reichardt's devastating miniature about a drifter, whose string of small calamities severs the only ties she has left, demonstrates once again the difference between art and artiness. Shielded from misfortune only by a car, a few hundred dollars and the companionship of her dog Lucy, Wendy (Michelle Williams) makes her way north toward work in Alaska, until her auto breaks down in Oregon. One by one, through painfully plausible and petty incidents, she loses all the modest things that separate purposeful from aimless drift—including Lucy, who vanishes from her post outside a supermarket. "If a person can't afford dog food, they shouldn't have a dog," declares the teenage clerk (only a paycheck away from Wendy's straits) who catches her trying to shoplift chow for Lucy. Whatever truth lies in those words, it's also true that Lucy is the only bond Wendy has left; in the strictures of a bust economy, the movie assigns a brutally specific price to being loved or being alone—the cost of a can of dog food. With the plot stripped down to its barest but most compelling element—surviving on no money—and the incidental characters mostly defined by their jobs, every small mercy shown to Wendy takes on the cast of a biblical parable, especially the kindness of a parking-lot security guard (Walter Dalton) who's among the few to act like a person instead of a cog. Shooting her Genericville main drags and fluorescent-lit Kwik Stop restrooms with eloquent directness—the movie's location scout gets a deservedly well-placed credit—Reichardt shows the same gift for alert contemplation and everyday lyricism that distinguished her previous film Old Joy (whose star, singer Will Oldham, appears briefly). As enveloping as her sense of place is, though, her greatest asset is the miraculous Williams, whose desperate, searching presence in almost every shot haunts the movie like a pang of conscience, or hunger. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)
SOUNDER The Nashville Public Library's "Movies @ Main" series is a great no-cost outing for families and movie nuts: free monthly screenings of projected DVDs from the library's voluminous holdings. This weekend, the downtown library shows Martin Ritt's 1972 classic adapted from the William H. Armstrong novel, with Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson as the sharecroppers who struggle through the savage racial, social and economic inequalities of the Depression-era South to provide their son (child actor turned director Kevin Hooks) with a way out. It's fashionable to knock Ritt for the earnest, sober qualities that once made him an exemplar of socially conscious Hollywood filmmaking—the phrase alone is a faceful of snooze powder—but the movie, especially Tyson and Winfield, remains an arrow to the heart. Scripted by Lonne Elder III and featuring Taj Mahal's original score, it screens 11 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 7, at 615 Church St., free and open to the public; families are encouraged to bring lunch and a blanket. —Jim Ridley
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