Certain Women

Synopsis: A brief encounter with the lives of four ordinary women (Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone) living in provincial Montana.

Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to her generally disappointing 2013 film Night Moves is a return to the world of small lives that is her forté.  Basing her screenplay on short stories by Maile Meloy she creates a beguiling portrait of four contemporary and very ordinary women. I say four because although the film has three separate stories and three “stars” in Dern, Williams and Stewart, newcomer Lily Gladstone shares the screen equally with Stewart in their segment.

The film opens with Dern as Laura Wells, a lawyer in the provincial town of Livingstone. Montana who is dealing with a difficult client (Jared Harris). We don’t know at this stage where this is going. The man seems unhinged and possibly dangerous but Laura appears to have his measure, something  which she amply demonstrates when he takes a security guard hostage and she is called upon to talk him out.  We then abruptly cut to Williams’ Gina Lewis (Williams has starred in Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy in 2008 and Meek’s Cutoff in 2010), who is in the proces of building a house in the countryside with her husband (James Le Gros) and daughter (Sara Rodier) with neither of whom she is in sync.  Almost seamlessly this shifts to the third story, that of a young woman (Gladstone) who is looking after some horses on a farm over winter and strays into a class on school law being taught by Stewart’s harried junior lawyer, Beth.

Although the title suggests a Woody Allenish pun these women, if in their own ways strong, are far from certain.  They are, if anything, circumstantially unsure of their place in the world, existentially estranged from it and worn down by their obligations. Laura expresses this most directly when on the phone to her lover she regrets that had she been a man, people would simply accept what she said and unlike her lot in life she wouldn’t need to keep justifying herself.  Beth lives in fear of being exposed as a fraud and is exhausted from driving eight hours to teach a class that she knows little about to people with no real interest in what she has to say. Gina’s attempt to buy some sandstone building blocks Is even to herself an obvious metaphor for her attempts to make her seemomglycrumbling world solid and lasting whilst the young horse wrangler is in the grip of an infatuation that she barely acknowledges, let alone understands. All, in other words, are drawing from the well of loneliness.

Ms.Reichardt  tells these stories with rare delicacy. Although in all cases we only see a sliver of these women’s lives they emerge as palpable individuals. It is a cliché to describe them as characters we care about but in this case it is true.  Much of this is down to the compelling performances. From Dern’s remarkable turn as a woman who knows that she must content herself with life’s leftovers to Gladstone’s youthfully inarticulate yearnings, from Williams’ walled-in wife and mother to Stewart‘s joyless drone, the economy of Reichardt's script is made eloquent by these four women. All this and the wintry Montana landscape is beautifully captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt‘s crystal clear lens and enhanced by Jeff Grace’s subtle, empathetic score.

There is only one criticism that I have of the film and that is the fourth segment, a kind of tacked-on, sort-of happy ending which returns briefly to each of the stories. As the film does not have a conventional narrative structure but rather gives us a “slice of life” there is no evident gain to be had by this and the stories would have had greater impact had they been left open-ended. Even so, Certain Women is an exceptional work in the annals of America cinema whose output is barely known for its subtlety.

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