The mailman is safe this time

Lucy is a dog and she does not poop in Wendy and Lucy. I assume she has all the parts to effectively make poop and dispense with it on other people’s lawns, but we do not see this part of Lucy’s existence, which is why I can safely say that this is a higher breed of dog movie.

But I’m not so sure it’s really a dog movie. The other character in the title, Wendy, is Lucy’s owner. She’s on the road in a beater car, heading to Alaska where a job in a fishery supposedly pays well enough that it’s worth the cross-country trip, and worth living near a fishery in Alaska. Lucy is her travel companion, although we’re denied the typical Dog Movie gags — Lucy doesn’t talk, doesn’t chase down bank robbers or the mailman, and at no point does she eat an expensive loafer or slobber on the record collection. Instead, Wendy and Lucy exists in the margins, in the subtle composition of a woman and her only friend and the closeness that exists between them.

Wendy is played by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) in a role that should have generated some Oscar buzz last year — the film was eligible since it officially came out in 2008. Her performance is comparable to Melissa Leo’s nominated performance in Frozen River. Both films are about hopeless people stumbling into final acts of hope and redemption. Williams, who’s now the custodian of Heath Ledger’s Oscar statue until their daughter turns 18, evokes a raw, realistic performance void of all the flirty nuance and camera winking of typical roles. She plays it — underplays it, although effectively so — like a real person, like she’s the subject of an impromptu documentary. Passages of the film are spent with Wendy walking, looking, thinking and planning, Lucy always nearby. The audience is just a pedestrian in the story, observing her journey in careful detail from 15 feet back.

As we watch these details — like Lucy’s dog bowls in the car trunk, and Wendy’s sink baths in rest stops — a plot slowly emerges: the beater has broken down in Oregon and money is getting tight. Alaska and the journey’s end seem to take five steps back. With her funds dwindling, Wendy tries to lift some food from a grocery store and gets nabbed by an overzealous stock boy. The police are called and she’s handcuffed and carted away with Lucy still tied to a bike rack. By the time she pays the fine and walks back to the store, her precious travel companion is gone. The stock boy, who she publicly shames, refuses to acknowledge Wendy or her missing dog, which complicate matters further.

The film essentially follows Wendy as she looks for Lucy, tries to get her car repaired and squeak by with what little money she has left. She meets people along the way who are beacons to her backward progression to her new Alaskan life. Will Patton plays a gruff mechanic who delivers bad news in a movie filled with nothing else. An animal shelter worker offers help, but little more than waiting can be done for a missing dog. A kind security guard offers moral support as Wendy’s world crumbles around her. In his last scene, the guard gives her all the money he can spare — it’s $6, and Wendy wants to sob when she counts it out.

Maybe you can sense this movie is heading toward calamity, or at the very least an emotional chasm, but it’s not one of those movies (Patch Adams comes to mind). It doesn’t pull needlessly at heartstrings or manipulate its way into our tear ducts. It’s an honest movie with an honest ending. It speaks eloquently to disenfranchised young people who leave the comfortable parts of their lives to experience new chapters, or maybe just entirely new beginnings. Sometimes their new plans work, and sometimes they don’t. The movie suggests that homeless people are Wendys, people with elaborate goals and dreams but no car, money or dog in which to drive them forward.

Some readers will read the praise I've heaped on this movie and feel as though they should run out and see it. I highly recommend it, although I realize it’s not a movie that everyone will enjoy. This beautiful independent feature doesn’t have all the filmmaking flourishes of bigger pictures: the colors are muted and cold, the soundtrack is quiet, there is very little dialogue, no action, and not even a love story or a cute dog moment. What it does have is a sincere character who makes choices that reveal her deeper humanity. Some people, sadly, will be better attuned to Scooby-Doo or Space Buddies or some other pet movie where the pets talk or fly spaceships or shit on the neighbor’s daisies. Wendy and Lucy is not one of those movies. And proudly so.