A low-key and finely wrought study of quiet desperation is illuminated by an extraordinary central performance from Michelle Williams. Although best known recently for her association with the late Heath Ledger – she’s the mother of his daughter – Williams is first and foremost a very fine actress. This simple but affecting story of a young woman whose luck runs out in an Oregon backwater is a timely reminder of William’s empathetic and expressive talent.

Williams plays Wendy, a migrant worker in the middle of a long journey north to Alaska where there is work to be found in the fisheries and a better life to be earned, shift by gruelling shift. Accompanying her is her beloved dog Lucy, a big, raw-boned hound with a quizzical expression and an abiding love of fetching sticks. Wendy maps out her journey by the dollars spent on each leg, tallying up the remains of her $500 life savings in a neatly optimistic pocket book. A battered Honda provides both a roof at night and a means of transport. But when one morning the engine hacks like a consumptive and refuses to start, Wendy’s careful calculations disintegrate.

Things get worse when, in desperation, she attempts to shoplift some dog food. A zealously by the book supermarket employee insists on calling the police, and an anguished Wendy is driven away to be processed in the police station while Lucy is left tied up, peering expectantly into the shop. When Wendy is finally disentangled from the red tape of provincial policing several hours later, her dog is gone.

With no address, no phone number, no dog and barely a dime to her name, the fragile foundations of Wendy’s existence start to crumble. She makes one plaintive long distance call to the home of her sister, but is met with harassed indifference. This is the only hint of biographical detail we’re given about this young woman. People as desperately poor as she is don’t have the luxury of a back story – hers is a life lived hand to mouth and entirely in the present.

Perhaps reflecting Wendy’s breadline subsistence, director Kelly Reichardt strips the filmmaking down to its very basics. The only score is a half-formed, hummed little tune, a song that got caught in Wendy’s subconscious and insists on keeping her company. The photography is grainy; the dialogue minimal – the longest speech comes from a fellow itinerant labourer about a drunken misadventure with some earth-moving equipment. Visual echoes of tales of the Depression era abound – latter-day hobos ride the rails to wherever they can earn a buck or two.

Considering the current economic climate, it’s tempting to see the compassionate social realism of this film (and of the Sundance prize winning Frozen River, also screening at the festival) as part of a more socially-aware, less market-driven movement in American independent filmmaking – a new austerity cinema perhaps. If the global financial meltdown inspires a few more films of this calibre, then perhaps it’s not all bad.

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