Movie Reviews: ‘Wendy and Lucy,’ ‘The Class’

Wendy and Lucy is many things: buddy picture, social critique and road movie deconstruction all in one. It might also be the most subtly moving picture of the season. Michelle Williams stars as Wendy, an earnest gamine who, along with her dog Lucy, travels from Indiana to Alaska in search of lucrative work at a fish cannery. Things go awry, however, when her car breaks down in a small-town Oregon parking lot, signaling the first in a series of calamities that challenge both Wendy’s moral fiber and her pocketbook. She is arrested for shoplifting, her dog goes missing and her car proves beyond repair, leaving her stranded and almost penniless.

Adapted from Jonathan Raymond’s short story “Train Choir,” Kelly Reichardt’s script illustrates just how frightening and unforgiving a generic suburban milieu can become for individuals on the periphery. Wendy runs afoul of both miscreants (a late-night park predator, a gang of squatters) and various incarnations of authority (a vindictive grocery clerk, police officers), none of whom are sympathetic to her plight.

The overriding parking-lot-as-social-microcosm device works very effectively here, largely because Reichardt’s approach to the material is so delicate and unforced. She’s an astute reader of faces and bodies, and her characters are vascular and fleshed out rather than the transparent stand-ins for larger ideas that often appear in this sort of construct. The film’s success also relies on Williams’ performance. Appearing in nearly every frame, she invests Wendy with just enough fecklessness to make her situation credible, but also enough grit and determination to make her a sympathetic everywoman. As her dilemma worsens, it’s her stubborn and lachrymose devotion to Lucy that buoys her—as well as the plot—right up until the end.

Although it might not be obvious, the arc of Wendy’s sour road trip serves as a uniquely contemporary answer to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. Both pictures focus on characters in search of an elusive American dream, both illustrate the fundamental peril lurking within even the most commonplace of our native landscapes and both have a great deal to say about the nature of friendship. The important update here is that Wendy and Lucy is a road saga interrupted, a travel narrative that gets nowhere for want of sufficient resources and sympathy. It couldn’t be a more apt metaphor for our troubled economic times.

Equally rife with social significance is Laurent Cantet’s The Class. This year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, the film covers a full academic year inside a turbulent Parisian junior high classroom within the city’s rapidly gentrifying 20th arrondissement. But don’t expect another up-by-the-bootstraps parable on the order of Stand and Deliver. The film’s star, François Bégaudeau, is a real-life teacher and author of the memoir Entre les Murs, on which the film is based. The students are also real; their screen characters and dialog were developed during a series of on-site workshops. The resultant authenticity will have many mistaking the picture for a documentary.

Cantet limits most of the action to the classroom, his multiple digital video cameras filming it like a tennis court, forever ping-ponging back and forth between teacher and pupils. Claustrophobic as this may sound, the film never suffers for want of compelling drama. The students, all from assorted racial and socio-economic backgrounds, challenge Bégaudeau at every turn. Despite his almost saintly pursuit of an atmosphere of respect and diligence, they accuse him of bias, question his sexuality and openly flout his instruction. Nevertheless, even the most intransigent among them manage to learn, often in spite of themselves. The Class is the most stirring and authentic portrait of young France we’re likely to see anytime soon, and in its humble way, sets a new standard for the classroom genre.