February 9, 2006
In Dear Wendy, Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, Danish doyens of the arthouse Dogme ‘95 movement, team up to give a typically off-kilter take on the fascination with guns. Brit Jamie Bell is a hick-town loser, not manly enough to stand a job in the mines. Coming across an antique pistol, he finds cold steel giving him the inner confidence he doesn’t have. Soon he’s socializing with other losers as The Dandies, gun-friendly pacifists who meet to shoot off in private. And yes there’s a sexual undertow, the film riffing on the stereotype of guns as appendages – the boys have one, the girl shoots two. Vowing never to reveal their weapons in public, you just know it’s going to happen. And a slow-burn-build leads to an inevitable queasy showdown as good intentions and naivete bite the dust. Not even Bill Pullman’s well-meaning sheriff can put things right.
This wouldn’t work were it not for the strongly drawn characters. Losers finding friendship and self-respect is as much the theme as the guilty pleasure of gun-owning. Shot around the town square and the run-down mine, its modern-day western motifs are there to see. High Noon and Butch Cassidy cast a deliberate shadow. But it’s the rites-of-passage pangs that make Dear Wendy so poignant.
Blackly comic, quirky camera moves map the trajectories of the bullets – and inserts show you the damage. Dear Wendy is a contemporary tragedy with satisfying sleight-of-hand touches. It doesn’t blow you way. But it shoots from the hip – The Zombies’ Time of the Season beating hiply in the background to prove it. A sharpshooter of a film, it brings you as close to a gun as you’ll ever want to be.
This wouldn’t work were it not for the strongly drawn characters. Losers finding friendship and self-respect is as much the theme as the guilty pleasure of gun-owning. Shot around the town square and the run-down mine, its modern-day western motifs are there to see. High Noon and Butch Cassidy cast a deliberate shadow. But it’s the rites-of-passage pangs that make Dear Wendy so poignant.
Blackly comic, quirky camera moves map the trajectories of the bullets – and inserts show you the damage. Dear Wendy is a contemporary tragedy with satisfying sleight-of-hand touches. It doesn’t blow you way. But it shoots from the hip – The Zombies’ Time of the Season beating hiply in the background to prove it. A sharpshooter of a film, it brings you as close to a gun as you’ll ever want to be.