Next up on the Letterboxd Challenge (albeit several weeks late) is “road movies.” So this is a movie that came out in 2008, and was perfectly suited for the zeitgeist of the world it was born into. It’s about a woman (Wendy) and her dog (Lucy), as Wendy drives her ancient Honda Accord from her Indiana hometown up to Alaska, where she hears you can get good jobs. She’s clearly living on the edge of precarity, with a notebook that has detailed tracking of her meager cash savings, sleeping in her car in a Walgreen’s parking lot.

It’s a good movie, and one without a whole pile of plot to it, so I’ll give my conclusion up front here, that it’s a compelling, though somewhat distant, portrait of this character and of that recessionary time (those who found Nomadland insufficiently gritty will be more satisfied here), and if that sounds appealing to you, well, it’s only 80 minutes, so go forth.

But if you’re not going to watch it, and yet inexplicably want to read about it, comprehensive movie-ruining spoilers follow.

So what happens next is a series of crises: First her car breaks down in the Oregon town she’s passing through. Then she runs out of dog food, so goes to the grocery store to shoplift some, where a zealous teenaged employee — who has that righteous hall monitor affection for the sanctity of The Rules — pushes to get her arrested. When the cops come, they leave her dog behind, tied to a bike rack. By the time she gets out of jail, having had to pay a $50 fine, the dog is gone.

So, as would be the case for most people, finding her dog becomes her first priority now, and is the thing she spends most of the next day panicking and stressing about. She goes to the pound, she retraces her steps, she leaves articles of her clothing around so that the dog can smell them and come back, she puts up little flyers. (And of course, all this is made harder because she doesn’t have an address or even a phone of her own — yes, it’s 2008, but she doesn’t have the money for a flip phone, apparently.)

But worse news is to come: The problem with the car is a “rebuild the engine” type. The mechanic tells her that it’ll cost thousands of dollars, “more than the car is worth.” Which is maybe true in a purely financial sense, but the worth of that car to her is far more than its cash value: That’s her ticket to Alaska, that’s her home on the road, that’s been her life for this trip. Without the car, what does her future look like? Well, she’s going to have to find out, because she doesn’t have thousands of dollars.

And then good news: The pound did have her dog, and it’s already been taken in by someone. They give her the address where the dog is, and here is the most absolutely gutting scene in the movie, because without a car, Wendy’s future is uncertain and there’s no way in hell she can take care of a dog. (I mean, she was already shoplifting dog food before that.) And meanwhile, Lucy is in a nice suburban yard, and looks to be well taken-care-of. And so the gleeful reunion turns into a teary goodbye, as Wendy knows that the best thing for the dog is to leave her behind.

The last scene of the movie is Wendy by herself, hitching a ride out of town on a freight train, reduced to even more precarity than she was at the beginning of the movie. Will she get to Alaska? Do those good jobs exist? I guess for those answers, you need to wait for the next movie in the Wendy and Lucy Cinematic Universe, bold choice to end on a cliffhanger for the next installment in the series.

One of the notable things about the movie is that for all Wendy’s marginality, she mostly is treated with kindness, understanding, and small acts of generosity (with the priggish grocery store kid being the exception). The Walgreen’s security guard who makes her move her car out of the parking lot lets her use his phone, and slips her a little bit of cash that he can’t much afford either. The repair guy has a business to run and can’t repair the car for free, but isn’t a jerk about it. The pound lady is sympathetic, if business-like.

In this sense, and given the overall arc of the movie, it’s reminiscent of one of the episodes of Agnès Varda’s Vagabond. One can hope that things end better for Wendy than they did for Varda’s protagonist.