'Certain Women' was released in 2017; we watched it last night.
It's beautifully observed and beautifully shot. The Montana landscape features throughout and perhaps frames the characters as having small parts in a wonderful but indifferent world.
The opening scene struck me forcefully and established this framing: a wide plain with a vast tabletop mountain as the backdrop, through which an incredibly long train passes. The endless succession of identical grey goods trucks felt almost crushing. It suggested an endless succession of lives lived out grimly in the beautiful cold.
The first two stories shared a theme of 'women enduring men'---not angrily but rather credibly. In the first, Laura Dern is the lawyer to Jared Harris, who has had terrible misfortune and persists in trying to keep her involved. Most summaries of the film recount that Fuller (the Harris character) was screwed over in a worker's compensation claim, but to me (even re-reading the script) this is not entirely clear. I don't think it matters; the point is that he has lost and is lost, and depends entirely on Laura for support.
It'd be so lovely to think that if I were a man and I could explain a law people would listen and say "Okay." Oh, that would be so restful.
The second tale is slight and though I see a few other responses reading it as 'well-intentioned woman trying to fit in has a dick of a husband', I don't think it's altogether that simple. Michelle Williams is the driver of her one-daughter family: running a business, building their country getaway, setting the standard for her daughter ("did you brush your teeth..? did you really?"). Her story connects with an older resident, an earlier pioneer, now abstracted and alone, and I think there is something being said about the futility, or at least the imperfectability, of the quest for the West here. The old-timer build his house 50 years ago and never quite finished it. Perhaps he himself had once hoped to make use of the sandstone blocks which he now somewhat reluctantly offers Gina, the Michelle Williams character.
In the conclusion, Gina seems to have found a lonely satisfaction (and loneliness is certainly a connecting thread here). She contemplates the house-to-be, complete with the authentic sandstone, while sipping wine, at a remove from her husband and daughter, but resolute. Is the husband having an affair (with Laura) because he's pulling away, or being pushed away? It doesn't seem to matter. There seems to me to be a sympathetic affinity between Gina and the old-timer (Albert, played by René Auberjonois): a shared appreciaton of bird calls, and a clear resonance in the lives they are trying to build: isolated and I suppose resolute. Albert ends as Gina begins: gazing upon the pile of blocks for the potential and promise they hold.
Lily Gladstone and Kirsten Stewart feature in the last, very moving story, which draws out the gentle passion of a lonely (yes!) ranch hand called Jamie (Gladstone) who is smitten at first sight by a vision of cosmopolitan beauty (Stewart---whose character perhaps isn't entirely lonely, though certainly tired and struggling like all the rest).
There are fascinating threads here: 'Jamie' can be a man's or woman's name; there is a suggestion of disregard for Native Americans; and the rancher at sea in the big city is gently comic. Laura has problems, Fuller has problems, and Fuller has very real problems, which are sympathetically treated, but Laura's problems are certainly in some degree to do with being a woman: Fuller doesn't take her lawyerly advice but does demand emotional support ("write me a letter!").
It's fascinating to see a film which functions like a short story collection: plot is secondary, deftly drawn characters are essential, and the mood is richly detailed. This is clearly feminist cinema (again comic where the long-suffering Laura is sent to confront the shotgun wielding Fuller by the jolly and ineffectual male police), and perhaps connects to a tradition of women's cinema, in the sense of the female gaze, that I associate with Miranda July and want to explore further. I guess I'm thinking of observational understatement (the July films "Lovely and Amazing", "You and Me and Everyone We Know", but then not "Kajillionaire"), contrasted with a more established cinematic (male?) tradition of the spectacular---explosions, conceits, whimsies, which can be very entertaining but can perhaps be read as self-congratulatory.
It was mildly amusing to talk about this film and say "it's based on Maile Meloy's short stories" and be heard saying "it's based on stories of male malaise"!
Some other reviews:
"a minor miracle... Michelle Williams, Reichardt’s regular collaborator, is a high-achieving wife and mother designing a weekend retreat in the hills who only subliminally realises the extent of the estrangement between her and the rest of her family."
The New Yorker (Richard Brody:
"The first two episodes offer little besides moderately engaging plots, but the third packs an overwhelming power of mood, observation, and longing."
"Certain Women is more about the small, persistent, frustrating things that wake you up in the middle of the night. Or rather, the big things, like patriarchy and capitalism and colonialism and homophobia and the slow disenfranchisement of rural America, as they are expressed through small everyday losses and misses."
"Unlike most feminist films that critique the implications of women as mere sexual objects, this film posits that women are just inconsequentialities to a masculine world."