kelly reichardt Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Whoa! Keanu Reeves may have won the popularity contest with his one-note performance as an alien, but specialty audiences came out in big numbers for a variety of limited releases, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. In addition to the films mentioned by Eugene in his overall look at the charts -- Gran Torino, Doubt, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire -- other good performers included Steven Soderbergh's Che and Gus Van Sant's Milk. Che inspired sell-outs at the two theaters where it opened in New York and Los Angeles, despite its four-hour plus running-time. Milk expanded to 328 theaters and had a per-screen average just a little less than The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Amidst that high-powered competition, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy more than held its own, earning $10,700 per screen at the two theaters in New York (Film Forum) and Los Angeles (Laemmle Sunset 5) where it opened. No doubt the film benefited from the presence of Michelle Williams in the lead role, which is an odd thing in itself. Her celebrity status, such as it is, accrues from her relationship with Heath Ledger, but her own career, especially post-Dawson's Creek, bespeaks her interest in pursuing roles in the most independent of films.

If Williams' name value makes more people curious to check out Wendy and Lucy, so much the better. Summarizing the reviews, Eric D. Snider wrote: "The consensus is that it's a tender, beautifully shot, emotionally intimate little film." Reichardt's previous film, Old Joy, was a quiet masterpiece. Wendy and Lucy expands into suburban Los Angeles this coming Friday, and then it will slowly roll out to other theaters nationwide over the next couple of months.

Director Kelly Reichardt's much-anticipated follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2006 fest circuit hit, Old Joy, continues to show Reichardt's remarkable gift for classically simple, deeply engaging storytelling. Wendy and Lucy is the story of Wendy (Michelle Williams), a down-on-her-luck girl who's hoping to turn things around for herself with a summer job at a fishing cannery in Alaska.

Wendy's making the trek from Indiana to Alaska in her beat-up Honda, accompanied only by her dog, Lucy, and about $600 to make the entire trip. When her car breaks down in a small Oregon town, Wendy is forced to make a series of increasingly difficult choices, and to rely upon the kindness (or not) of strangers to resolve her plight.

I'll have a full review up of Kelly Reichardt's new film, Wendy and Lucy, up later, but a quick note on tonight's screening of the film. Reichardt made 2006's critically acclaimed Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy was one of the films I was most looking forward to checking out here at Cannes.

The big movies are great, but the joy of seeing a smaller film like this at a fest like Cannes is one of the best parts of attending this festival. All I'll say for now is that I liked Wendy and Lucy even better than Old Joy, and Michelle Williams's performance (which is pretty much the entire film) is great.

Williams, looking absolutely lovely in a lacy gold dress, showed up briefly in the Salle Debussy theater with the cast and crew to wave at the crowd from the stage. Audience response to the film was positive, though I didn't really expect any boos with that much of the cast, and particularly Williams herself, in attendance.

I don't believe she stayed for the screening, though -- the pic above was taken on the red carpet for the premiere of Adoration, which was screening tonight next door at the Lumiere (with Cinematical's James Rocchi covering the red carpet for IFC), so I expect she quietly slipped out when the lights went down to attend that.

Upcoming: Review of Atom Egoyan's Adoration; tomorrow is the screening of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the Sony Pictures Classic lunch/roundtable for Adoration, followed by Wim Wenders's The Palermo Shooting.

Kelly Reichardt's latest is a subtle, elegant meditation on friendship and identity in a cultural moment where honest cultivation of either is treated like a luxury. The NYU professor's second feature in twelve years, Old Joy stars indie folk/rock legend Will Oldham, and Daniel London as two old friends grown distant. Oldham steals the show as Kurt, a scrappy manchild who calls clean-cut father-to-be Mark out of nowhere and suggests they embark on a camping trip that afternoon. Both men appear to be in their late 30s, but that's where the similarities end. Mark channels his ample liberal guilt into self-righteous volunteer work; when Kurt mentions a recent wild night with an old, mutual roommate, all Mark can remark is that the guy owes him money. Kurt, meanwhile, is the prototypical neo-hippie space cadet, and is clearly getting too old for his practiced nomadism. He's still together enough to know that he's a little far gone – he's riding that fine line between knowing how crazy his ideas sound aloud, and knowing with equal certitude that his eccentricities are all he has left.

There's a kind of inherent queasiness to revisiting a dormant friendship, and Reichardt gets this exactly right.  Mark is clearly resistant to Randy's efforts to rekindle their bond, and it eventually becomes clear that time elapsed is not the only roadblock standing between the estranged friends. It's clearly been awhile since the heyday of these guys' relationship, and Reichardt uses the temporal distance between the men to paint an elegy for all things that time frustrates before it outright kills. If the primary concern of the film is a single relationship's demise, Reichardt uses the idea of time to deftly meander through other themes, and in its own way, Old Joy is just as much about the death of the small town and the privatization of nature as it is about these two guys. When Kurt asks about the local indie record store, Mark informs him that it's been turned into a smoothie place call ReJUICEnation; later, Kurt drunkenly mumbles something about the connection between sorrow and "worn-out joy", and the whole film clicks into place.

After the film's first SXSW screening, Reichardt acknowledged that she had prepared backstories for each of her characters – each actor was made aware of a past incident that had essentially ruined this friendship, and both were directed to work that knowledge into their performances without specifically acknowledging their traumatic past. And so one character waits until the pair is stranded for the night to break down and reference their shared distance, the other pretends like nothing is happening, and some kind of uneasy balance is reclaimed. Meanwhile, the film couldn't look better (it's gorgeously shot in matte primaries, with almost supernaturally green pines piercing a slate gray sky), and Yo La Tengo's mellow guitar score is the perfect accompaniment to Reichardt's highly economical film.