Certain Women

In Norway, there exists a phenomenon called "slow TV" where hundreds of thousands of people tune in to watch the minute-by-minute unfolding of a train ride or ship cruise. (The inspiration for these broadcasts is said to be Andy Warhol's 1963 avant-garde film Sleep, which consisted of a static shot of poet John Giorno sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes.) The shows are popular, to the point that they've inspired the BBC and other entities to experiment with the format. Some even report they feel addicted to the strangely soothing slow broadcasts.

I bring this up as a way of inoculating Kelly Reichardt's determinedly life-size Certain Women from an obvious objection some moviegoers might lodge against it. Is it really slow? Or does it simply confound one's expectations of what a movie is supposed to be? Reichardt has, over a 20-year career, consistently mined the emotional dynamics of ordinary life with understated dramas that rarely employ traditional Hollywood tropes or plot devices in conventional ways. Sometimes this results in thrilling cinema -- for instance, her Western epic Meek's Cutoff (2010), which cross-examined the old bones of the covered wagon odyssey from a plausible feminist perspective, or her heartful 2008 girl-and-her-dog story Wendy and Lucy. (I had trouble warming up to 2006's Old Joy, which a lot of smart people love.)

Her current film feels a lot more eventful than Old Joy, and its three lightly interlocking stories originated as short stories by Maile Meloy, a Montana-based writer who is unfairly better known as the older sister of Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. While Reichardt had previously worked closely with screenwriter Jonathan Raymond (who is also a novelist and art critic), she adapted Meloy's stories herself, which might account for the less elliptical feel of the material. In any case, Certain Women feels of a piece with her previous work, but it might be her most accessible movie to date. It's no Jack Reacher, and to many it will present as under-powered and drama-less -- a too-near simulation of the ordinary life we find ourselves immersed (and sometimes drowning) in.

Yet a few are likely to find it remarkably rewarding, the sort of movie we wish would come around more often.

Like all of Reichardt's films, Certain Women studies the ambivalence of lonely people as they try to push back the suffocating banality of their lives; even events as potentially rife with explosive potential as mid-day trysts and hostage situations are treated with an offhand, awkward matter-of-factness.

The situations these characters find themselves in don't seem loaded with cinematic material. They seem more like neighborhood gossip: Laura (Laura Dern), a lawyer trying to convince her client (Jared Harris) that he has exhausted all avenues of filing a claim against his former employer; Gina (Reichardt regular Michelle Williams), who feels that her husband (James Le Gros) and daughter are conspiring against her; and horse groom Jamie (Lily Gladstone), who feels confused by her feelings for skittish young lawyer Beth (Kristen Stewart).

All of the performances are excellent, but Williams might deserve special notice because we learn the least about her character, only that she's both a better negotiator than her husband and his work supervisor. And that together they're building an "authentic" cabin in the Montana wilderness. Certain Women is not a movie constructed around chewy dramatic scenes, but Williams manages to quietly communicate the emotional exhaustion of a woman who knows it's ridiculous to ask for or expect pity.

Similarly, Dern's character has nothing to say about the hermetic affair she's conducting with -- we later realize -- Gina's husband; we get no sense that she knows of Gina. And after a desperate Jamie drives through the night to try to find Beth, the first office she walks into to inquire is Laura's -- who arrives shortly after Jamie leaves.

And when Jamie does finally come face to face with Beth, she doesn't have anything to say. She shrugs and smiles and turns around to drive the four hours back to the barn, because her animals will miss her. Even when she falls asleep at the wheel and runs off the road, the impact is muted. Reichardt allows no catharsis. Catharsis is too simple, too male and too easy.

Set in a flat Montana of hard blue skies and jagged horizons, Certain Women is a different kind of modern Western; one where confrontations are deflected and firearms feel impotent. What is most important about these stories is the Beckettian persistence of these women. They can't go on. They go on.

MovieStyle on 11/11/2016