I go to see... WENDY AND LUCY

film: Wendy and Lucy
director: Kelly Reichardt
where and when: The Cameo till Thursday March 12th, and then at the Filmhouse from March 27th

In this careful, sometimes ponderous, always subtle film, a woman on the edge loses her dog and, er... Well that's about it. Technically it's a road movie - she's on the way to Alaska in her beat-up Honda Accord - but more accurately it's a pothole movie, because she gets stranded and goes nowhere. My companions were divided in their views. Two thought the film was dreary, pretentious tosh, and one thought it was meaningfully restrained...

Wendy loves her dog Lucy - I mean, they French kiss, as near as damnit. I'm not going to tell you if she finds the doughty pooch or not - you'll need a sliver of narrative tension to see you through that 1 hour and 20 minutes of hound loss - but to focus on the meagre plotline isn't really the point. Wendy and Lucy is an examination of the big gaps in the ideal of the American dream, personified in the closed, lonely, go-(not)-getting character of Wendy as she has a few strokes of bad luck and fails to grasp any good luck.

The story can approach a sort of featureless photo-realism - nothing much happens, often, and it's often in real time that the nothing much that doesn't happen, doesn't, um, happen. In other words, the tedium is authentically tedious. But of course everything is interesting ultimately, if we look ever more closely; even boredom.

My interest was held, most of the time - the acting is superb, modulated, achingly sad. So much context and information is held back from our understanding of the characters' impoverished interactions that the watching audience has to work out its own moral framework to place upon the plot's tiny premise.

For a good analysis of what's so good about the film, try this New York Times review; for an opposing argument, channel4.com puts the boot in, tenderly.