An excerpt from the booklet essay by Elena Gorfinkel.

Kelly Reichardt’s stripped-down narrative is marginally linked to the road film, a generic framework that has long been a site of departure for Reichardt, as seen from her first feature, a revision of the outlaw couple on the run trope, River of Grass (1994). Here, the story, like the car and Wendy’s aspirations, stalls out in an unnamed town in the Pacific Northwest. The film thus observes the environment of this emptied-out garrison in smalltown Oregon (shot on the outskirts of Portland), one which stands in in for a deindustrialising Pacific Northwest – dotted by freight trains and shuttered up storefronts, gas stations and donut shops. Wendy’s mounting stuckness, tautly observed, soon becomes an avalanche: car trouble signalling costs that can’t be paid; an arrest for shoplifting two cans of dog food; and, the disappearance of her dog Lucy, tied up outside the grocery store, while Wendy is taken into police custody. These quiet calamities create a widening chasm between the aspiration and achievement of a modicum of not even a ‘good life’, but a life, any life at all.

Reichardt based the film on Jon Raymond’s story ‘Train Choir’, (from his 2008 collection Livability). In Raymond’s fiction – Verna, the basis of Wendy’s character – is fleeing both the impacts of flooding and the trail of unpaid bills in its wake that threaten to suffocate her with debt. In the years and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, multiple American disasters permeates the film’s atmospheres, images, sounds, and textures. Reichardt and Raymond discussed the context of Katrina and judgments of disaster victims: in “having no net - let’s say your bootstraps floated away - how do you get out of your situation totally on your own without help from the government?” Wendy’s economic and social predicament – alone, an outsider, without supports -- is couched in a pervasive sense of offscreen upheavals, causes which remain unspoken. Like her bruised ankle covered by a bandage, gingerly tended to but never explicitly addressed, the wounds of the past and material conditions remain persistent presences, chafing at the body and the spirit. Amid the tumble of its domino-effect, Wendy and Lucy asks: what constitutes a life that remains above the line – of poverty, basic sustenance, and hope? What do neighbours and fellow travellers owe each other? Under the penumbra of debt, what kind of duties of care are possible?

In an interview, Reichardt made the analogy between Wendy’s and the film’s small economic means – within such terms there is “not a lot of room for a mistakes”, for either character or filmmaker. Shot over twenty days on a $300,000 budget, the film embodies a tradition of aesthetic and economic autonomy of American independent cinema; Reichardt remains one of its foremost exemplars. Reichardt’s often remarked upon ‘minimalist’ social realism, what A.O. Scott in 2008 identified as a tendency of a revived American ‘neo-neo realism’, placed her work alongside other American independents of the period like Lance Hammer’s Ballast, Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, and So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain (all 2008). Italian neorealism and the central conceit of the lost bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), and his Umberto D (1952), with its heart-rending account of an elderly pensioner and his dog Flik are also clear genealogical forebears.

Elena Gorfinkel’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.