Inessentials

Spoilers for the first 30 minutes of Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy, a very small and moving film about a woman working her way across country to a job in Alaska but is delayed in a small town in Oregon, is so careful in its study of a person at the edge of society that in its brief 82 minutes it reveals a great deal about individuals and the way they understand and interact with society.

Although there is a lot to consider in this film, one scene struck me particularly. In this scene, Wendy has been caught shoplifting dog food for her dog Lucy. An eager teenage stock boy grabs her arm roughly and leads her into a back office where a manager sits. At first, Wendy denies that she took anything. When the young stock clerk pulls her purse from her and pulls out the cans of dog food, she begins to scramble reasons for why she did it and why she’ll never do it again. The teenage stock boy goads the manager into calling the cops. “It’s store policy.” “You have to treat everyone the same.” “If she can’t afford a dog, she shouldn’t have one.” Having grown attached to Wendy over the early scenes, these words sound snide, almost hateful.

What director Kelly Reichardt and writer Jonathan Raymond have done is to provide a nicely encapsulated feminist critique of rule-bound ethical systems. While not clearly endorsing any particular ethic of care or explicitly acknowledging any link to the pioneering work of Carol Gilligan, the film presents instead a simple moment in which the viewer hears words that he or she has probably spoken at some point, words that sound very right when spoken in generalized form, but that seem very, very wrong when we see the consequences they have for Wendy (and for Lucy). By placing these generalized ethical rules in the mouth of a teenage boy, it further emphasizes that these sorts of rules are adolescent, limited, and we need to move on from them toward a system that allows us to treat Wendy with the care that the film recognizes she deserves.

That’s a very thoughtful moment in a film that addresses homelessness, social blindness, charity, friendship, and more in a very sophisticated yet never preachy way.