Naturally I’m going to slowly go through Kelly Reichardt filmography given how much I like her work. Here’s one that was made a couple of years after Old Joy and stars the very same dog. This is a less complex film given that it’s mostly just Wendy in many of the scenes and using a dog to pull at the audience’s heartstrings feels like cheating. Still films don’t have to be complicated to be good and this is a brutally straightforward take on being down and out in Oregon.

Wendy is making her way north to Alaska in search of work in a beat-up old car and accompanying her is her dog Lucy. She is near penniless, having saved just enough money to make the trip and sleeps in the car. In a town in Oregon, her car breaks down and she runs out of dog kibble. When she tries to shoplift some dog food from a supermarket, an overzealous young clerk detains her and the police is called to arrest her. She remains in the custody of the police for several hours while Lucy is tied up outside the store. By the time she gets free and returns to the store, Lucy is missing. Even as she frantically searches for Lucy through the streets of the dog, going to the pound, posting fliers and so on, she has to deal with not having enough money to get by and certainly not being able to afford to get her car fixed so that she can continue on your journey.

The premise here is so simple and straightforward that there’s not much call for the layers of subtext I loved so much in Old Joy. The plight of someone being forcibly separated from her dog is always heartbreaking and Reichardt is to be commended for portraying this ordeal without sentimental drama. Wendy is shown as being a practical person and accustomed to living rough. We can observe how irrational it seems to go so far in search of work and how unprepared she seems to be to make such a trip but it’s easy enough to suppose that her motivations aren’t entirely about money. Judging from the unsympathetic telephone conversation she has with her sister, we can guess at some troubles at home she is running from and who can begrudge her pursuing some imagined dream of a new life in a new place. Still, I feel that this scenario seems out of step with today’s reality. Wendy doesn’t even own a mobile phone for example and asking after seasonal work opportunities through word of mouth seems so last generation. The newer Nomadland is vastly better at portraying the life of transients.

Some of the film’s most interesting parts to me are the interactions between Wendy and the various people in town. There’s the retirement age security guard who is just trying to do his job to get Wendy to move her car but comes to sympathize with her after seeing her a few more times. The sanctimonious young store clerk who is so proud of himself to catch her shoplifting and his manager who realizes that his employee is being an asshole but doesn’t want to be accused of not enforcing the rules either. It’s a grim look at the uglier side of rural Oregon being left behind by economic development in the cities. I will note however that poor as some people there are, to me the film still shows how unfathomably rich the US looks to the rest of the world: the police facilities are modern and well-run, the dog pound is clean and humane and the people working there genuinely dedicated to helping Wendy find Lucy and so on.

I can see how this film can touch some viewers as a highly personal story of loneliness and sacrifice and what dog owner can deny the agony of a woman desperately searching for her lost dog. Still this is too simple a film to be truly impressive so I regard this as solid work but not a very ambitious project to take on.