Kelly Reichardt, the director of Old Joy (2006) and the new Wendy and Lucy, deserves a lot of credit for politically aware movies that deal with people who live on the margins of society and aren't usually represented even in indie films, and she does get a lot of credit. Old Joy was no blockbuster, but it was probably one of the best reviewed movies of the last few years. That film starred Daniel London as a married man with a pregnant wife and Will Oldham as his longtime buddy, whose unsettled lifestyle, part bohemian and part derelict, has started looking less romantic as the two of them head into the mid-thirties. The bulk of the movie depicts what will likely be the last of a series of camping trips that the two men have gone on over the course of their friendship; it's not just that the two are growing apart but that the possibilities life once offered them have begun to shut down. London's character is about to face the responsibilities of fatherhood, while Oldman, who has the look and manner of a balding hippie burnout, may be on the verge of homelessness and drug addiction. Lest the viewer mistake these guys as just two sad cases instead of representatives of a diminished age, the soundtrack is monopolized by Air America talk-radio broadcasts that come pouring in through the family man's car radio, one sad dispatch after another about the sorry state of things in the extended lame-duck phase of the Bush era. Old Joy was first shown midway through Bush's second term, in the spring and summer before the 2006 midterm elections, and the gratitude that it inspired in many people has to be a response to the way it seemed to reflect the mood of melancholy hopelessness that a lot of people felt after Bush's re-election and the widespread feeling that the country was turning into a train wreck with nobody at the controls. (Reichardt has said that the movie is about "a point when anger turns to ruefulness.") Wendy and Lucy, which aims to capture a similar tone of poeticized depressiveness, (and which, like Old Joy, is based on a story by Reichardt's co-writer Jonathan Raymond) is being dropped into a much-changed political climate, yet it feels almost as lucky in its timing. It ties into current economic fears and the question that many people must be entertaining these days: if the very worst happened to you, just how bad could that get?
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