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Readers might remember Reichardt’s previous feature, Old Joy, which premiered in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September 2006 and played for a week at the Music Box two months later. Part landscape film, part muted drama, it followed two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) as they try to rekindle their relationship with a road trip to a natural spring out in the wilderness. Like many such reunions, their time together only confirms that they no longer really understand each other, and the sadness of their dead friendship is objectified by the passing of lush greenery into crummy industrial landscape as they drive home.
Presenting her film at the AMC theater in Toronto, Reichardt explained that she and coscreenwriter Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after listening to the conservative backlash and “contempt for poverty” that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some commentators, she recalled, couldn’t fathom the idea that you can’t escape a storm zone if you’re too poor to own a car. In her movie, Wendy has no safety net whatsoever—no job, no insurance, no assets except for her beater. She’s one mishap away from falling through the cracks forever, and in its haunting finale, Wendy and Lucy recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy’s classic Depression-era drama I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932).
