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Wendy (Michelle Williams) is so close to getting there before everything goes wrong. Hailing from Indiana, where it’s implied she’s leaving behind family close to having had it with her, she’s traveling by car with very little but her dog, Lucy, to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she has sights set on a job she doesn’t even have secured at a fish cannery. The co-writer and director of Wendy and Lucy (2008), Kelly Reichardt, doesn’t exactly tell us what 20-something-year-old Wendy is running away from and why this particular job in this particular city together seem so holy. But this is a movie less concerned with character minutiae than an all-consuming immersion into its time and place and the overwhelming, paradoxical feelings of hope and despair that will especially grip Wendy soon into the movie.

We meet Wendy and Lucy when they’re stopped in Oregon. It’s here that Wendy’s probably hasting planning will hit its ostensible biggest snags yet. Her car breaks down. She realizes that she’s run out of dog food. She doesn’t have any money to spare for either. She has about $500, presumably about the amount it will take to pay for the gas that will get her to Ketchikan and the small meals that will sustain her in the meantime. Desperate, she shoplifts a few cans of wet kibble for Lucy. But an ingratiating teenage supermarket employee sees what she’s up to and rats on her. After she’s taken to jail, Lucy, whom Wendy had tied up in front of the store, goes missing. A fleet 80 minutes, Wendy and Lucy is set nearly exclusively inside this storm of uncertainty. Will Wendy manage to find Lucy? Will she be able to afford whatever it’ll cost to fix her car? Will she make it to Ketchikan, or will she have to return to Indiana with her tail between her legs? 

So insouciant that it’s like she doesn’t want us to notice it, Reichardt’s touch fortifies the emotional hugeness these everyday problems present. Not a day passes where people aren’t losing dogs, having car troubles, or fretting about money, but here you can practically feel how much this series of unfortunate events mount to feel like not much different than the end of the world. No longer having Lucy, a source of comfort and feelings of additional purpose for Wendy, to turn to only puts into sharper relief what Wendy doesn’t have — how truly vulnerable she is. One of the scenes where this is most frighteningly clear is when Wendy tries, as a last resort, sleeping for the night in a spot of secluded brush, only to find herself awoken by a mumbling passerby. She can’t be sure how much of a threat he poses, but she can be sure that she likely wouldn’t have to deal with him if she had Lucy by her side keeping an eye out and growling if need be.

Though there’s this encounter, plus the infuriating brown-nosing of the teenage employee who snitches on her, Wendy and Lucy isn’t a movie interested in routinely demeaning its lead like some other people with whom she crosses paths might be. Most people are actually pretty decent, from the mechanic (Will Patton) who works on Wendy’s probably hopeless car to the security guard (Walter Dalton) who keeps a sympathetic eye out for Wendy after he’s forced, at the beginning of the film, to boot her sedan off the Walgreens parking lot he mans. 

Wendy and Lucy is an observant, moving survival movie where the only thing really keeping this forlorn young woman going is an optimism for a better life for herself and for her dog. Williams isn’t given a lot to say, but her performance emits her character’s unspoken convictions in a way that tells us everything we need to know about a tenacious young woman struggling to maintain that tenacity.