I’ll admit I’m a relative
newcomer to Kelly Reichardt and while I wasn’t completely enamored with her
latest endeavor, Certain Women, it
piqued my interest enough to double back on her earlier and frequently
celebrated Wendy and Lucy as well as Meek’s Cutoff. Something of a blood sister to Lynne Ramsay
with the same sensitivity, care and nonjudgmental approach to their respective
female protagonists, this year’s episodic equivalent to 2002’s Morvern Callar tells the quiet and
loosely connected Montana set tales of four different women based upon short
stories taken from Maile Meloy’s collection Both
Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.
While entirely disconnected from one another with abrupt transitions
between stories that somehow manage to make Todd Solondz’ juxtapositions far
less comparatively jarring, Certain Women
functions as a snapshot of rural Montana life from a female
perspective. Beginning with attorney Laura
Wells (the always superb Laura Dern) who is entangled with a disgruntled client
before seguing into married couple Gina and Ryan Lewis (Michelle Williams and
James Le Gros) and closing on a Native American ranch hand named Jamie (Lily
Gladstone) who forms an obsessive bond with a young schoolteacher (Kristen
Stewart), the stories remain almost entirely separate yet are thematically
linked to the chilly and mountainous region they take place in. Less of a conflict driven narrative than an
observation of strong minded women living out their lives in the desolate
region, Certain Women is an anecdotal
take on feminism that’s equal parts southern fried drama and new age mumblecore
while gently hinting at the brief moments in all three characters’ lives where
they step outside of the boundaries of their normal daily routine.
Co-produced by cult horror
director Larry Fessenden (who starred in Rechardt’s debut feature River of Grass) and Carol director Todd Haynes, Reichardt’s 16mm film effort joins
Haynes’ aforementioned film as another example of scenic beauty and lush color
saturation captured through the use of a low grade film format. Detail and sharpness aren’t as important here
as heavy thick carpeted grain levels with many wide shots of mountain peaks looking
like a dense living photograph, thanks to Reichardt’s longtime cinematographic
teammate Christopher Blauvelt. Music is
sparse and occasional, if at all, with an intentionally subdued and
unremarkable sound design that captures the naturalistic sounds of winds, a
recurring motif of a train horn and particularly in the final chapter the
sounds of horse hooves crushing the snow.
Performances by all four actresses are solid, conveying a myriad of
emotions through subtlety and nuance rather than capital A acting bombast,
although I have to say the least compelling thread of the three involved
regular Reichardt actress Michelle Williams in a chapter that brings the silent
momentum of the first and third segments linking the film together to a halt. Something
of a slow paced portrait of self-actualization where whether the characters
achieve their goals or not is beside the point of accepting their places in the
world. All three tales share a kindred
sense of romantic yearning while limited to the routines of the world they live
in, providing viewers with an insight into each characters’ personal dilemmas
struggling with life in the harsh and barren American Northwest. |
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If there’s a
complaint to make about the film, its that there’s no real payoff for the
stories, only a continuation with a sense of optimism (or defeat, depending on
your point of view). Watching Certain Women I was reminded of Jane
Martin’s stage play, Talking With…,
which was a thrust theater play consisting of eleven ten-minute monologues
featuring a different woman elaborating on her own individual life story. Not because of the personal ordeals
encountered by the women speaking onstage but because of how completely
unrelated they are in summation. Rather
than making a grander collective statement on the kindred lives of these women,
they are simply presented as disparate anecdotes which don’t leave much for the
viewer to take away other than relating to the episodes that touched them the
most. The ensemble piece is as old as
the cinematic medium and theatrical form of storytelling itself but only
recently have we begun to see in theater and film a propensity for collections
of completely unrelated and disconnected short stories that should add up to more
than they do. In the scheme of female
director driven films concerning headstrong women or women in crisis, Certain Women tends to meander and
comparatively is the weaker sex to films like the rural triangular romance Far from the Madding Crowd or the
brilliantly hilarious Love & Friendship. But it did ignite my interest in an auteur’s
earlier catalogue that, yes, I can recommend to cinephiles looking for a more
distinctly American voice in the independent film scene.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki