Certain Women (12A.)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, James Le Gros, and Rene Auberjonois. 107 mins.
The film opens with a train, one of those big old American freight trains that are about half an hour long, chugging across one of those big old American landscapes. It's an ironic opening – the freight is on its way somewhere, unlike the characters in the three vignettes featured in the film.
It is also a nod to Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, another film with three, occasionally overlapping, stories set in a single location. Here the location is Livingston, Montana, in the depths of winter when the big sky is pushed down by overbearing clouds and miles of majestic sweeping drabness can be seen in all directions. The stories are taken from the pen of Maile Meloy, and they are slices of life cut very thin, with no dressing. In the first lawyer Dern has to deal with an awkward client (Harris) who cannot accept that he has been cheated out of a fair compensation payment after a workplace accident. Williams is a mother on a camping trip who feels that her husband (Le Gros) instinctively undermines her. She also wants some stones for the house they're building. Gladstone is a ranch hand living alone who becomes captivated by Stewart when she sits in a class on education law she teaches.
And even those brief sentences feel like I've given away the whole plot. The first story has something resembling a dramatic confrontation, but after that nothing happens in this film. It really pushes the limits of what audiences will sit still for, and three people headed for the door after an hour and I sensed some frustration among some of the people that stayed.
There's nothing happening but plenty going on; though maybe not so much that you put a finger on it. Certainly loneliness is a theme, and the first two stories seem to deal with emasculated men and women that resent being blamed for their emasculation. Reichardt's style is so calm, so unobtrusive that it borders on parodic, especially when she is documenting the daily routine of looking after the animals on the ranch.
The film arrives in cinemas overburdened with awards and critical acclaim, of the kind that can do a film like this a disservice. It works though, if you let it; it does something you almost never see, not even in fly-on-the-wall documentaries. For a while it lets you live a completely different life in another part of the world.
Directed by Kelly Reichardt.
Starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, Jared Harris, James Le Gros, and Rene Auberjonois. 107 mins.
The film opens with a train, one of those big old American freight trains that are about half an hour long, chugging across one of those big old American landscapes. It's an ironic opening – the freight is on its way somewhere, unlike the characters in the three vignettes featured in the film.
It is also a nod to Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, another film with three, occasionally overlapping, stories set in a single location. Here the location is Livingston, Montana, in the depths of winter when the big sky is pushed down by overbearing clouds and miles of majestic sweeping drabness can be seen in all directions. The stories are taken from the pen of Maile Meloy, and they are slices of life cut very thin, with no dressing. In the first lawyer Dern has to deal with an awkward client (Harris) who cannot accept that he has been cheated out of a fair compensation payment after a workplace accident. Williams is a mother on a camping trip who feels that her husband (Le Gros) instinctively undermines her. She also wants some stones for the house they're building. Gladstone is a ranch hand living alone who becomes captivated by Stewart when she sits in a class on education law she teaches.
And even those brief sentences feel like I've given away the whole plot. The first story has something resembling a dramatic confrontation, but after that nothing happens in this film. It really pushes the limits of what audiences will sit still for, and three people headed for the door after an hour and I sensed some frustration among some of the people that stayed.
There's nothing happening but plenty going on; though maybe not so much that you put a finger on it. Certainly loneliness is a theme, and the first two stories seem to deal with emasculated men and women that resent being blamed for their emasculation. Reichardt's style is so calm, so unobtrusive that it borders on parodic, especially when she is documenting the daily routine of looking after the animals on the ranch.
The film arrives in cinemas overburdened with awards and critical acclaim, of the kind that can do a film like this a disservice. It works though, if you let it; it does something you almost never see, not even in fly-on-the-wall documentaries. For a while it lets you live a completely different life in another part of the world.
