It’s rare nowadays to feel at the end of a movie that it was too short. ‘Wendy and Lucy’, at 80 minutes is short, but that wasn’t the reason I felt cheated. Just as I thought that now she’d ditched the dog the heroine could start getting her life together, the credits came up. What went before seemed more like an anecdote than a story.

A teenage girl’s car won’t start after she’s spent the night in a parking lot of a small town with her dog. A sympathetic elderly security guard helps her push the car onto the street. She’s arrested for shoplifting dog food at a convenience store.We know, because she keeps an expenses notebook, that she has $500 dollars to get her to Alaska. She telephones a sister who’s indifferent to her plight. The dog disappears after her arrest and she’s told the car will cost $2,000 dollars to fix. She leaves the dog, which has been found a home by the pound, and hitches a ride on a freight train.

Michelle Williams performance as the girl, a waif-like paedophile’s delight in cut-off jeans, is understated. She always looks too clean. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare with the similarly elfin Sandrine Bonnaire playing a more credible drifter in the harrowing ‘Vagabonde’, because Wendy arrives in a Honda and uses the petrol station rest room as a bathroom. I remember ‘Brokeback Mountain', exploited the same downtrodden air she exudes, presumably so you didn’t blame Heath Ledger too much for getting bored.

The film has been praised for the Pacific North West scenery and it’s true there are times when Wendy frolics with her dog Lucy and the light falls elegantly through the leaves or the distant mountains make a pleasant backdrop. Whether they add anything meaningful to the story is something else. The hint of a lost Eden seems facile in the context.

The soundtrack is likewise restrained, with the natural sounds of trees and birds contrasted with freight-train clashes and a humming that seems not to belong to Lucy herself but often presages some further stage in her downward spiral.

Even the night she spends in the woods near the tracks, reminiscent of 'The Blair Witch Project' is oddly inconclusive, with a half-crazed outcast crashing around in the dark and the camera fixed on the girl's eyes above a blanket.

The film, too, seems self-consciously starting a band-waggon of movies about economic depression and the questioning of capitalism. It’s not just the Steinbeckian theme-‘I hear they need people up there’ - that gives rise to this suspicion so much as talk about the lack of jobs in the small town, where the old guy has to work a twelve-hour shift and the garage mechanic who one suspects will sell the car at a profit as soon as he’s fixed it up for a lot less than he’s pretending it will cost. You start to distrust him as soon as you see it's Will Patton.

Wendy is an enigma – too childlike and vulnerable to be on the road but not apparently suffering from a mental condition like the man in the woods. How did she get the car and the money? We don’t know.

In another film where the protagonist heads for Alaska – Sean Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’ – he’s driven by pressures at home that are finally revealed to us as he dies of starvation in his a remote location. Here the filmmaker gives us no reasons and no sense of closure. Like the financial crisis, we don’t know how we got into this mess and there’s no knowing whether we’ll get out. Maybe, too, much depends on how much you empathise with the idea of one girl and her dog.