Meet Wendy. She’s an anonymous suburban youngster travelling to Alaska in a beat-up Honda in the hope of a job with her golden retriever Lucy for company.
 
Fastidiously ticking off every dollar spent in a notebook and making ends meet by sleeping in her car, she keeps going on the vague hope of summer work in a fish cannery.
 
However, her precarious financial balance is knocked off kilter when, after stopping off in Oregon, her jalopy refuses to start and – desperate for food – she’s caught shoplifting in a convenience store.
 
“If a person can’t afford dog food then they shouldn’t have a dog,” is the unfeeling comment of the officious shelf-stacker who spotted her minor pilfering.  
 
He’s the first in a line of jobsworthy officialdom - from incompetent cops to greed garage owners - to conspire to nudge Wendy off her fragile trajectory and into the dark margins of the homeless and dispossessed.
 
Williams subtly conveys Wendy’s plight with a weary air of demure acceptance. She’s not a loudmouthed crusty aggressively begging for an unearned due but a naïve waif blessed with good manners honestly trying to earn a bean.
 
Director Kelly Reichhardt and writer Jon Raymond wisely shy away from any Michael Moore-ish rants: Wendy’s social disintegration takes the almost imperceptible form of tiny, incremental falls.
 
She loses her dog (forcing her to stay put until it can be found) and she loses her car (which means she has to sleep rough). Taken together, these mine the depleted contents of her purse and propel her ever lower.
 
What strikes a cautiously optimistic note is the presence of Walter Dalton’s humane security guard, a beacon of goodness whose small kidnesses sound out a suggestion of hope.
 
It’s a quiet, undemonstrative movie but the points it makes go far, far beyond the breast-beating of more political film-makers.

Tim Evans