Why did I wait so long to watch Kelley Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy? I can't think of another film whose release was so spectacularly ill-timed, in late 2008 no one wanted to watch a movie about a young woman named Wendy who with no job who can't pay to get her car fixed. The fact that said young woman is played by Michelle Williams at the height of her powers doesn't help. Williams is stripped of all vanity as the story requires; I loved the almost apologetic way Wendy shuffles around between her junky car, a gas station bathroom, and the grocery store where she loses her faithful canine companion Lucy. That said, there's little going on in the film besides Wendy's poverty; there's no one for Willams to play off and we learn little about her background. Reichardt's Old Joy seems to me a far richer and more complicated piece of work (I wrote about it here), but like that earlier film Wendy and Lucy must be celebrated as a triumph of American regional filmmaking.
The most surprising thing about Jon Poll's Charlie Bartlett is it's conservatism. Teenagers like Charlie (Anton Yelchin) and his girl Susan (Kat Dennings, working with much less than she did in Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist) may act out but what they really need is structure and some adults who are happy enough with themselves to pay the kids some attention. Poll doesn't go far enough with satirizing the overmedication of kids (Charlie briefly becomes popular by dispensing meds to his classmates); instead he opts to pair Charlie up with Susan's father (Robert Downey, Jr.), who is also the unhappy principal of Charlie's school. I've no problem with the message of Charlie Bartlett, but I wish its teens had been allowed to have a bit more fun.
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