Wendy and Lucy solidified Reichardt's reputation for films that are “a touchstone of the new realism in American cinema” (New York Times). Drifting upwards to Alaska like a twenty-first-century Depression heroine (“I hear they need people up there”), Wendy (Michelle Williams) has only her dog Lucy and her car as company, but soon loses first the car, after it breaks down in Oregon, and then her dog. Wendy is, for Reichardt, emblematic of so many Americans: barely holding on, and ready to slip through the cracks of a society with little safety net.