good evening welcome to another edition of the fifth four popcorns i'm the moderator tonight my name is janet stern and i am delighted to be joined by two of our regular panelists now and campbell and carol welsh  fourth member also reviews theater and there's a lot of theater out right now so he he's busy at the theater tonight we're going to be discussing primarily one film it's playing in our area now and it's called certain women it's got a lot of attention it is davitt directed by kelly reichardt who filmed one or two of who sounds we've discussed on this show before but we can get into that she has quite a distinctive style and carol i was wondering if you could summarize this for a salute like a certain women is has three somewhat interlocking plots they're all set in the same town in montana anyway and it's three women  dern plays is in the first plot she is a female lawyer in this small town and she has quite an annoying client who he feels he was cheated out of his  worker's comp settlement or some personal injury settlement and he won't leave her alone he feels his life has been ruined by this accident it was a workplace accident and he doesn't understand why he's not getting any  money so he always shows up to his her her office bothering her about it and even though she keeps explaining to him that he accepted the settlement so he's not going to get any more money she he won't listen to her until she takes him to a male lawyer who tells him the same thing and then he seems to understand this this gentleman gets more and more agitated and to eventual a he takes a desperate act from the second plug is with michelle williams and she and her husband and her actually her husband is having an affair with laura dern and we find out they are building a house and in the mean time while the building the house the living at ten on the on the house side she doesn't seem to get a lawyer with her husband or her daughter of a don't get along with her and  they go to buy some stone from the house from an old man that's about as much reply as there is about one third plot is actually maybe the most moving of the three where a young woman who is caring for a ranch during the winter and so basically there's nobody else there but her she cares for the animals but she stumbles upon an evening walk las law she she comes and she she just loves looking at christminster and they go out to dinner and that's that's for plot and it's all in this setting of montana directed all joyeux wendy and lucy and meek's cutoff there's a similarity in a lot of the films she's just she's described as the poet of it was wrapped up in just ended with a beat with a black screen and i hate this sort of post modern stuff has a beginning middle end is based on a short stories and they are three different short stories from until different collections even though there are linkage is parenting linkages between the stories they really prepared for this movie and in some ways because i although i had seen old joy i didn't realize this was the same filmmaker and so i wasn't i wasn't prepared for the slow pace of the film and i think of the ship and so i was sort of taken aback at first by the slowness of it all but i think if you look at the three story lines and then they're somewhat in are twined but not much you know it's very very different  i think you can see how sometimes this sitting back and letting it happen and not drawing any conclusions sometimes in in at least one of those three stories i don't think worked at all because i didn't know what what to make of of the characters or what point was trying to be made i think get much out of it i thought the middle one with with michelle williams i'm not sure it communicated very well thing and i don't think the script answered my questions i thought that there was a possibility that the wife was very angry maybe because of the affair maybe because they were living in a tent but i wasn't when living in the there they were they were they had their jobs in the city but they would come out on weekends and you see and i don't think that was really clear i think sometimes it was a little bit me say ah that's what i thought too i thought they were typically montana totally lonely but in a way also sounds a vision and full of and for him it seemed to me for him the more about albert the one i'm not the one i think it's about i don't care but also her reaction to albert and her reaction to albert is interesting because she doesn't get them and all that she then she saw or put some sort of invest of herself in those sandstone rocks so that she could have some kind of permanence that she wasn't finding it anywhere she was trying to be with and i am not here maybe in a film there is something deeply deeply empty there this profoundly she's got a profound emptiness and for some reason she's seeing these stones as the way to build a foundation  and i think i want to say one more thing and then open it up again but i i disagree with both of you a little bit when or maybe marilyn you can say this but i don't see it is slow i see it as there are volcanic things happening in these people and she the director is not showing us they're expressing of that we have to do the work and what i found what was happening was i would see a scene and my mind was working the entire time where is he going why does he have that way why is laura dern character awakened in the middle the night in the next scene you see her in the room trying to find a file in an office it gets it's your it makes you do the work exactly and it doesn't tire for you it doesn't doesn't resolve which is what bothered the reviewer and he and i think bothers a lot of people but then you have to figure out what's going on in these people's minds because they're not explicitly not telling you i thought that i did see before i went the move to the movie that the the rotten tomatoes rating for critics was like ninety three or ninety four percent positive for audience it was like forty two i mean audiences jen they don't get her i can yeah that and we're not used to doing that kind of work i found what i which you know so maybe there was somewhat of a delayed reaction i thought probably the last story line worked best everyone says that everybody was i don't i i liked it also i think what it is is very very very very the three main women played by recognizable hers is the last one there's a board woman who is very different yes she is a person who has become almost completely an articulate an older established lawyer still fighting against sexism in my head and i think the other a young lawyer starting out who came from humble beginnings but she is kind of driven that's how she got from i don't know her mother is going to be a lawyer and she doesn't know quite what to do with it and while also that there may not be all that many jumps eric rice many lawyers have found out when they've graduated recently right all right and so i think that that's the difference in the last story is that there's a fourth person who is who is not that kind of and he feeling kind of disappointed in what wife has hinted to her that she has a real life by she is her daily routine yes she opens the door she brings out the hey she lets in one horse she you know and that she fits in with montana she seems to be you are just part of that director or the artist if you if you will communicating anything yeah i mean i think the strength of the third story was that there was a clear communication made that this woman was lonely and that she found maybe somebody she lived in and was disappointed in this crush not to give too much away it was simple straightforward and and we could see we could conclude something from that like i was so model about the second story i didn't know if they were living there in the ten i didn't know if they weren't he says she's her bourse we don't understand what that means and is there some kind of family business i don't know what that means that that could give you very valuable information about what's going on and what the problem is in this marriage and but did you come up with your own conclusion about what was going on now  ok the other two i think i did but that central state to the middle story i thought was showed the the downfall or how this minimal storytelling can be in any idea about how why she got herself in there is another matter if that if any is the destitution i think in the middle story the problem plus i didn't know why michelle williams was so angry i didn't know was of the affair did she know about the fair didn't she know about the affair was she's mad because she was living in a tent as a husband when finished this house that she once i didn't understand i didn't get the characters didn't make sense to me i didn't that was in moment is one where it's not so well that the woman is the central character it seems to me the man man who is driven completely desperate by  being having a disabling accident and not getting satisfaction from the system or what the conversation he feels is just for having his wife completely ruined yeah  he's no longer able to work his marriage is in trouble it has some sort of a head injury so he had trouble he has trouble focusing it's trouble seeing you seem devil and apparently some police officers a to watch just his face and know how his emotions go up and down and he's completely reasonable one moment and completely demented of them but i let on that very point i would add that in the case of laura dern lawyer the lawyer she plays she's not able to help him really can't help him she's looking at him as a very unhappy person she can't do anything about it she's ineffectual michelle williams character is looking at a man who's also not in his not playing the traditional male role raise unhappy and a different style kristen stewart's character this this woman who was the ranch hand in the book was a man that's right that's right and i thought that changed it did i had a lot but you could see that there is no making nothing's going to be happening to make her happy either that person happy either  the ranch hand she's not going to come out of a she may become come out with a little bit of self knowledge but it there's a lot of people who can't communicate and make anybody their with happy room and i think that's the top that's the thing i think just going about their business and they're no happy they're not satisfied and they don't know how to fix it and then they're yeah and there's no path given to them by the plot or by the movie as to how to get to have  and i think that's all agree with that i mean i guess one could say if one were a traditional movie goer well you should have given them a way to get to happy maybe because dammit i want my money back and i thought it was interesting that two sees her i mean yeah that was just to forge a connection i guess and i thought it was interesting because she looks at her and it seems to me there may be completely really where all preoccupations into this performance i think is very interesting i mean she i think she's convincing as a last recent law school graduate who hasn't quite found her field as far as her career goes and you know isn't sure she ever will involved to go just to want to talk to someone who is comfortably silent and says hardly anything but she doesn't really understand what's going to hold her and she's certain women is the title it's not the time but it's for now it's not titled any of the short stories because some strangely enough there was an australian soap opera in the seventy's with the same name what you know i think it focuses you on the women that maybe there's something in common these women again this is communication you know when are we what are we  to conclude from this that perhaps certain women are unhappy certain women are certain more women can are uncomfortable with the rules or are certain women uncertain and yeah individually in their own actually the person i went to movies with a friend a female friend she thought it was talking about how women these women are born valued by the men  i mean it's hard to argue with that i would like to be happier too i would like them to find a way of expressing themselves i'll get there investigated when people can't talk but even though what they say might mean be meaningless on the surface one of the things i did like about the movie was the feeling of like you know people being small within a big landscape and that maybe there's something wrong with montana yeah well it's not hospitable to people and on that note if there are any montana i just want to say to tell you right out of the director is coming to the garden theater to talk about this not after a show and i believe it's november seventeenth but check the garden theater website but she will be there and i would love to see that but i don't want to pay for this twice and thank you for joining as well please join us again soon for another edition of this for popcorn thank you