Friday, November 14, 2008

Cute Dog Trapped in Mediocre Indie Film

Filmgoing has been scarce during the past few months, but we recently had a chance to preview Kelly Reichardt's indie film, Wendy & Lucy, starring Michelle Williams, at Film Forum. It was oddly comparable in narrative flow and content to Vittorio DeSica's 1948 gem, The Bicycle Thief. However, the comparison I make is a superficial one.

Both films explore the period of several days for two sorrowful protagonists who face immeasurable misfortune. For Antonio, it is a desperate search for a stolen bicycle, his ticket to a well-paying job that will help him support his family. For Wendy, it is a search for her dog Lucy, which goes missing while she is being arrested for shoplifting at a smalltown grocery store. Both characters make mistakes in their search for what seems to be the one thing that will save them from irretractable hardship. Yet, somehow Antonio's hardships -- far more believable and plagued with post-war doom -- make Wendy's concerns feel empty, superficial, and trite.

To be fair, I watched The Bicycle Thief at Walter Reade for probably the fourth or fifth time only hours before screening Wendy and Lucy. The grainy shots of post-war, decayed Rome and the hollowed expressions of the cast of non-professional actors still lingered in my mind as the pretentiously constructed non-diegetic hum over the opening credits for Wendy and Lucy rolled. (This hum, by the way, would return later in the film to create an equally distracting attempt at employing what I like to refer to as fulfilling a certain indie film trope quota.) And that may have been the film's biggest problem: it searched for ways to appear independent and wouldn't allow itself to identify and settle in its own independent skin. Wide, beautiful shots of empty exterior spaces in "Name Your Town, America" do not qualify. Nor does a protagonist with a hidden past who befriends a nameless security guard at Walgreen's.

I felt unresponsive to the needs of this character and to the turn of events in the narrative. Unlike Antonio's, Wendy's bad decisions didn't keep me interested in following the downward spiral of her tale. I just felt bored by them.

n.