PORT TOWNSEND ¬– After seven sultry weeks of “Slumdog Millionaire,” one of the most popular films to hit this town, the Rose Theatre is switching back to reality.
“Wendy and Lucy” is a road movie about a young woman who comes from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest hoping for a new start.
“I haven’t seen a movie like this, tied so strongly to the economic situation,” Rose owner Rocky Friedman said earlier this week.
The picture is, in a word, “dark,” said Walter Dalton, the actor who happens to be a bright spot, the one man who treats Wendy with compassion.
Dalton, a Seattleite and devoted fan of Port Townsend, will appear at the Rose Theatre this Saturday night to give a brief talk and answer questions after the 7:20 p.m. screening of “Wendy.”
A woman and her dog
This movie is about a young woman who goes it alone, save for her dog, Lucy.
Wendy, played by “Brokeback Mountain” Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, pulls into a small Oregon town en route to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she hopes to find work in a fish cannery.
Her car breaks down, she has a run-in with a gang of thugs, and an auto mechanic scarcely gives her the time of day before informing her that her ride is junk.
Wendy is stuck, homeless, jobless and without human friends.
Then Lucy disappears.
Dalton plays a Walgreens security guard who’s kind enough to hand Wendy his cell phone so she can call the animal shelter. Then, since she has no other way to receive calls in response to the lost-dog fliers she posts around town, he lets her use his cell number.
“You’ll find her,” he tells the bereft young woman.
In an interview from his Ballard home, Dalton talked about “Wendy’s” unusual appeal.
The ending of the story is a powerful, not predictable one, to his mind. And Wendy, as she navigates a chilly landscape before boarding a freight train northward, is to him an inspirational figure.
Wendy ‘a fighter’
“She keeps on fighting,” Dalton said. “She could have turned to prostitution and drugs; she could have hung out with the gang at the railroad tracks. But she’s a fighter. She has true grit.
“She’s lost everything, but she doesn’t quit. We can all learn from that.”
“Wendy and Lucy” is premiering on the North Olympic Peninsula in the midst of a movie boomlet: Ticket sales across the United States and in Port Townsend have been rising since the economic downturns of 2008.
“Slumdog Millionaire,” the Academy Award-winning picture about a boy from Mumbai, India, who wins millions on a game show, had a wildly successful run at the Rose, Friedman said.
“Wendy and Lucy” is “the flip side of ‘Slumdog,'” Dalton said.
It’s replacing “Slumdog’s” fantasy tale with a story that’s unfolding in all too many towns across this country.
Dalton pointed out that “Wendy’s” Portland, Oregon-based director, Kelly Reichardt, is telling a realistic story of desperation that’s been unfolding since long before the current economic tempest.
“Kelly knew there were people out there before, struggling and dying, with no assistance. This is a tiny, intimate story, and it’s very powerful.”
Dalton hopes the interaction between his character and Wendy offers another scrap of inspiration.
“When he tells her, ‘When you come back, look me up,’ he means it,” the actor said.
The security guard shows how being kind to someone down on her luck — giving her a few dollars, offering encouraging words and his cell phone ¬– makes the windblown Oregon town a little less harsh.
“He was a sweet man. He’s not very happy; he’s simple, a little bit jaded. But he’s got a big heart, as most Americans do.”
Dalton, who’s been in show business since he was a writer on “The Tim Conway Show,” “LaVerne and Shirley” and “Barney Miller” in the 1970s, still has a romantic streak.
Port Townsend setting
When he’s at the Rose Saturday night, he’ll talk a bit about his latest screenplay, a romantic comedy set in Port Townsend.
It’s about a pair of 17-year-olds, a boy who dreams of film school and a girl who’s headed for art school in Seattle.
His single father and her single mother meet and fall in love, all against the backdrop of Port Townsend socio-politics.
Dalton hopes to meet some young or otherwise budding filmmakers here who might embark on the project.
He envisions a low-budget production not unlike “Wendy and Lucy,” which Reichardt made for about $300,000.
“It was bare bones,” Dalton said.
One day on the set just outside Portland, he found he’d forgotten his hairbrush. When he asked a crew person for one, she replied that she didn’t think she had any styling tools on hand. And there certainly wasn’t a makeup truck for the cast.
All of this was fine with Dalton, however.
“Kelly [Reichardt] is the real deal. When you have a really sensitive artist as the director, when the material is just so strong, that’s what movie-making should be like. People work long hours because they really believe in the project,” he said.
Friedman, for his part, writes on the Rose’s Web site that months after seeing “Wendy and Lucy” for the first time, he glimpses the characters in Port Townsend.
“I see [Wendy],” he said, “in the faces of other young women who pass me on the street with their dogs.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
