excerpted via Highly:
It has been an exciting couple of weeks in Sydney for fans of director Kelly Reichardt.
Her first feature, River of Grass, screened in the Essential Independents festival in May, and her newest film, Certain Women, plays as part of the Official Competition at the Sydney Film Festival. River of Grass was a kind of fugitive romance in the style of Malick’s Badlands, darkly funny in the fact the protagonists were neither proper fugitives, nor properly in love.
But stylistically it was a world away from the subdued naturalism with which Reichardt is now associated, and of which Certain Women is her most recent example. This new film is an adaptation of three short stories by Maile Meloy, all set in the home state of the Montana-born writer.1 “Restraint” is word often employed in praise of Meloy’s fiction, a quality that makes it peculiarly compatible with the understated work of this director. The promise of such a pairing is only increased by the impressive cast of women Reichardt has assembled – teaming up with Michelle Williams for their third collaboration, she is also joined by Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart and exciting newcomer Lily Gladstone.
Laura (Dern) is a small claims lawyer in Livingston, who is struggling with a client (Jared Harris) who refuses to accept he has exhausted all the legal avenues of his workers compensation suit. Gina (Williams) is planning to build a second house with her husband (James Le Gros) outside of Livingston, and tries to convince ageing local Albert (Rene Aberjonois) to sell them a pile of old cut sandstone for its construction. On the other side of the state, a lonely ranch-hand, Jamie (Lily Gladstone), ventures into a nearby town one night. With nothing else to do, she follows a group of people into an adult-ed class, and is immediately enamored of its young teacher Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart).
As we might expect, Dern, Williams and Stewart do not disappoint in Certain Women, giving naturalistic performances that fit beautifully in Reichardt’s quiet film. Williams is particularly good as the most restrained and tense of the women, whose vulnerability only seems to surface in the furtive cigarettes she smokes while out running.
And the only disappointing effect of the film’s tripartite structure is that Williams is not on screen for very long. Lily Gladstone, too, more than holds her own among the more experienced actors – she has an expressive face that proves highly affective in front of Reichardt’s lingering camera.
Indeed, Certain Women is far less interested in developing overarching ideas than it is in depicting the smaller moments of failed understanding or missed connection between individuals.
While this disavowal of the overtly dramatic and this attention to human failings might make Certain Women sound very bleak, these qualities are offset by the film’s more gentle moments. Reichardt’s unobtrusive and non-manipulative approach seems to avoid the worst hazards of sentimentality. As such it is always engaging when she turns her hand to more touching scenarios, as she does, for instance, with the story of a lost dog in Wendy and Lucy. In Certain Women, the final moments spent with a disappointed Jamie, or those between Laura and her client, seem to achieve a similar kind of tenderness, one that leaves the film feeling melancholy, but not entirely despairing.
I think Kelly Reichart’s work is world class, and especially her oeuvre building on Maile Meloy’s stories, like Wendy and Lucy. And Michelle Williams shines in these works. Certain Women has moved to the top of my I-can’t-wait-to-see-this list.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/147994502827
