As you'll learn from my annual top ten list, coming soon to this very spot, I am much enamored of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy.  Formally, it's one of the simplest films I've seen all year, focusing as it does on a young female drifter passing through the Pacific Northwest with her beloved dog:  but through its slow build, it manages to turn into a highly emotional thriller that blends elements of nostalgia, wistfulness, bitterness, anger and shame into one of the most arresting pieces of narrative in a good while.  It's one of the few non-documentary films in recent American cinema with the courage to address economic issues in a way that's routinely done in foreign film, and it contains a number of quiet but very effective performances.

In an interview at IFC's website, director Kelly Reichardt -- who first came to my attention with the excellent Old Joy -- discusses the making of the film, the uncertaintly of bringing in a new cast, and how the idea for it came to be -- not so oddly, once you've seen it, the genesis of Wendy and Lucy  was a number of conversations Reichardt had over various reactions to the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  "These people, living in such peril, they wouldn't be in the the shape they're in, the position they're in," she says of the responses of many Americans to the misfortune of New Orleans' poor.  "If you don't have a net and you've had a shitty education and you don't have the benefit of family that's in any better situation than you're in, how does one improve their lot?  Not even reaching the middle class, but how do you just get a toehold in the next level?  That was the seed."

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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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Usually, the Screengrab's Take Five feature is inspired by some new release coming out the day we go to press.  However, sometimes, if the raft of new releases in relatively uninspiring or inappropriate, we go with a different sort of them, and since today is the start of Labor Day weekend, what better time to salute organized labor?  After all, some of us are union men ourselves (hey, the National Writer's Union is too a real union!  We're part of the United Auto Workers for some reason!); and what with the writer's strike earlier this year that brought the movie business to a near-halt, and the possibility of an actor's strike later in the year coming along to finish what the writer's strike started, America hasn't been this aware of what organized labor is up to in years!  Unfortunately, unless Vin Diesel's mercenary Thoorop in Babylon A.D. happens to be a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Hired Killers & Machinegun Operators, there's no new released this holiday weekend that are even remotely about unions or the labor struggle.  But that doesn't mean we can't dip back into our video vaults and come up with five fine flicks about working-class struggle for your Labor Day enjoyment.  (And, as a special treat before you go back to work on Tuesday, take a few hours to watch Barbara Kopple's masterful Harlan County U.S.A., referenced in last week's Take Five.)  Happy Labor Day, readers!

MATEWAN (1987)

Possibly John Sayles' finest film, Matewan depicts -- with the heart of a union man and the eye of an artist -- the brutal struggle to unionize among the West Virginia coal miners of the 1920s, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of organized labor.  Based on the Matewan Massacre of 1920 and featuring breathtaking cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan' s powerful story is bouyed by wall-to-wall terrific performances by Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, and a young Will Oldham, in his pre-rock star days.  Essential.

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