Certain Women

Plot synopsis:
Certain Women explores a handful of intersecting lives across Montana.
Lawyer Laura Wells (Laura Dern) has been dealing with a disgruntled client, Fuller (Jared Harris), for eight months. Out of work after a work place injury caused a disability he has taken to visiting Laura repeatedly at her office. As he will not listen to her advice she takes him to another lawyer who, after assessing the case, tells Fuller exactly what Laura told him; that though his company was at fault for his injuries he can no longer sue them after accepting their initial nominal settlement. On the way home from visiting the second lawyer Fuller feuds with his wife and is kicked out of their car and takes a ride back with Laura. On the way home, he tells her he wants to shoot his former employers.
That night Laura arrives at Fuller's former place of employment where he has taken hostage a security guard. After being prepped by police Laura goes and finds Fuller who has her read the case file his company has on him and the lawsuit. Laura reads the entire file which details how Fuller was cheated out of his settlement. He decides to let the guard go and then asks Laura to stall for him by going to the front and telling the police of his demands as if he has a gun pointed at her while he slips out the back. Instead Laura immediately tells the police where Fuller is and he is arrested.
Gina and Ryan Lewis (Michelle Williams and James Le Gros) are a married couple with a teenage daughter building their own home from the ground up. Gina feels that Ryan constantly undermines her with their daughter and is annoyed by his behaviour. On their way home from the campsite of their new home, they decide to stop at the home of Albert (René Auberjonois), an elderly man they know, to try to persuade him to sell them the sandstone on his property. As they talk Gina tries to persuade Albert to sell her the sandstone, but he interrupts her repeatedly and seems only interested in talking with Ryan. Eventually Albert tentatively agrees to give the sandstone to Gina and Ryan, and Gina, who has been secretly recording the conversation, signals that they should leave. In the car on their way home she finds it ridiculous how easily she was able to obtain the sandstone.
Sometime later Gina and Ryan arrive and load up a truck full of the sandstone. She notices Albert watching from his window and waves at him but he does not wave back.
Jamie (Lily Gladstone) is a ranch hand living in isolation during the winter, tending to horses on a farm outside Belfry. Heading into town one night, she sees cars turning into the school and follows them. She learns she has stumbled onto a class on school law taught by a young lawyer, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart). Jamie goes out to eat with Beth after class, and Beth explains that she lives in Livingston which is a four-hour drive away, so she must make the eight-hour round trip twice a week to make it back in time for her real job.
Despite having no interest in education law, Jamie returns to class week after week. One week she brings one of her horses to class, and she and Beth ride the horse to the diner. The following week, she is stunned when she learns Beth has quit and a new teacher is brought in as a permanent replacement. Jamie then immediately leaves the class and drives straight to Livingston. Spending the night in her car, she spends the morning driving to law offices hoping to find Beth. Locating her address, Jamie sees Beth in the parking lot and told her she drove over knowing that if she didn't she would never see her again. Beth fails to respond and so Jamie leaves abruptly. On her way home, she falls asleep at the wheel and plows into an empty field.
Laura visits Fuller in prison where he tells her his wife left him for a man in prison and implores Laura to write to him.
At the site of their new home Gina looks at her pile of sandstone with satisfaction.
Back at the ranch Jamie tends to the horses, still painfully alone.
The three stories intersect in passing: Laura is having an affair with Gina's husband Ryan, and Jamie inquires at Laura's firm while searching for Beth.

Tags: romantic

Review:
Pretty much every day life for some of us, nothing exciting, as much drama as watching the neighbor let the dog out...and sometimes that's more interesting than this film was.Apparently this is one of the director's best works.
Writer/director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, 2008) has adapted the short stories from Maile Meloy into a film with 3 segments focusing on the daily perseverance of three women in small town Montana (including a rare Wyoming joke).The first segment has lawyer Laura Dern returning to the office after an  umm  "long lunch meeting".
The issues on display here include the lack of respect for a female attorney, her unsatisfying personal life, and the one-way trust that can happen in times of desperation.In the next story, we follow Michelle Williams and her husband James LeGros as they meet with a lonely elderly neighbor (Rene Auberjonis) and offer to buy some limestone blocks that have been sitting on his property for decades.
The subtlety of the conversation embodies the missing respect and power of Ms. Williams' character.Emotions are exploding beneath the surface in the third segment featuring horse handler Lily Gladstone as she stumbles into a class being taught by Kristen Stewart, and is immediately captivated by the smart young teacher.
And let's not get started on assertions that it's "required viewing."And like all independent films that are directed by people so entranced by their own sense of magnificence, this film ends abruptly with an unprompted, unmotivated CUT to black in the middle of yet another meaningless scene.Reichardt's choice of when to end raises the burning question: Why wait for this dull, repetitive, meaningless scene when virtually every scene before it would have served the same point?What disturbs me most, is that someone thought this was worth funding..
This movie has great actors and was playing at Amerst Cinema which usually shows only very good films, many independent.
into the movie but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is the latest movie from writer-director-editor Kelly Reichardt, the acclaimed indie movie director who previously brought us "Wendy & Lucy" and "Meek's Cutoff" (both starring Michelle Williams, who returns here as well).
The movie brings three basically unrelated stories (based on Maile Meloy's collection "Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It"), and they all involve very ordinary people and ordinary lives that are shook up in one way or another (I'm biting my lips here, but won't spoil anything).
I feel rather sorry for that person that he or she cannot appreciate a high quality movie like "Certain Women" (it is not a coincidence that this is rated 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes)."Certain Women" premiered at the Sundance film festival earlier this year to great acclaim, and finally opened this past weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati.
You know from the movie previews and the rumblings from the multiplex's adjacent theater that today's movies are heavily weighted toward "action films." Writer-director-editor Kelly Reichardt could singlehandedly reverse that trend with Certain Women, which can most succinctly be described as an "inaction film." It's kind of hard to get used to Reichardt's pace, so you might watch this and think "Wha---?" Here, the drama is at the deep inside the characters, hidden from all views except the closest.
Big Sky Country, Montana, is the modern setting: Billings, Bozeman, and environs, the places where three women are ignored by men, misunderstood by both men and women, and call many of the shots that may end up putting food on their tables and courage in their hearts.Although feminists should be proud of the three heroines in Certain Women, their actions are not so much the stuff of heroics as they mostly navigate around misogyny and sloth in a world that mostly listens to men first even if the women are right most of the time.Laura Wells (Laura Dern) is an attorney with not really a thriving practice, but she gets along.
That she is the one to confront him, and not a crisis squad, is one of the stories' touches that clarifies why the heroines are "certain" women.Gina Lewis (Michelle Williams) is building a prairie house, part of which will be built with a pile of stones, she, not her husband, tries to convince an old man to sell.
The real drama bleeds out of the actors' interior depictions, the personal strength that overcomes diminishment by the vast plains, snow-capped mountains, and weak men.Because the three episodes are derived from native Maile Maloy's short stories, Certain Women is a tour de force of feminism disguised as rambling stories of women making a hard living in a hard West.
This trilogy feels like a film school end of term project.Nice try and some good shots, but if you want to get paid...Might get an academy award if there was one for "three slices of boring lives."MY GF and I searched long and hard and after significant stretching decided the theme here might belawyers get involved with strange, lonely people and need a lot of discipline to detach from those who cannot be helped and sometimes, especially women, they are stuck to their tar baby clients...Though it's not clear the one certain woman is a lawyer, she might be.This will have great value for film students as a lesson in how to make a nicely shot movie that goes nowhere.
Kelly Reichardt surely makes films like no one else right now, and without really trying too hard to be different, edgy, or unique.
Weaving together four reserved women's lives in Livingston, Montana may not sound like the kind of film that could climb its way into your innermost guts and set up a campfire; But that is exactly what this revelatory film did for me.Reichardt's all-star cast members give some of their greatest recent performances, led by Laura Dern as a lovelorn lawyer, Michelle Williams as a persistent progressive parent, and Kristen Stewart as an obliviously motivated 20-something.
Like all of Kelly Reichardt's previous treasures — OLD JOY (2006), WENDY & LUCY (2008), MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010), NiGHT MOVES (2013) — her understanding of classic American cinema is boundless, allowing her to re-envision those stories and images, breathing her very particular brand of stoic yearning into each and every gesture.Review is from my 2016 Sundance Film Festival wrap up at www.48hills.org.
I expect that certain social justice warriors and some feminists will be attracted to it because it presents and it frames the vignettes in ways that are supposed to tell the stories of the characters depicted therein from a gynocentric perspective and, indeed, people who don't consider themselves to be social justice warriors or feminists should be able to pick up on that, but in the end, it all seems a little too self-conscious and affected for my tastes.
It made me feel in a way I have never felt before watching a movie with how real and how much I, and most people can relate to her in life whether someone is alone, or just lonely in our heads.
Set in the rural West, the film features an impressive cast that includes Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and newcomer Lily Gladstone All are complex and resilient characters, yet individuals who resist any outward expression of their inner feelings.
In the longest and most powerful of the three stories, lawyer Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart, "Personal Shopper") has to drive four hours each way to teach an evening class on Education Law. One of the attendees, Jamie (Lily Gladstone, "Subterranea") is a lonely rancher who shows up each week to the class even though she is not registered.
Apparently physically attracted to the instructor, they meet after each class at the local diner, but the conversation about Beth's awful drive to and from work is less important than the poignant expressions on Jamie's face, looks that longingly search for clues that her attachment to Beth might be mutual.Though not overtly sexual, their ride on Jamie's horse back to her car is as subtle and as lovely an erotic expression as I've seen on film and Gladstone's rich and heartfelt performance deserves to be remembered at Oscar time.
Like other Reichardt's films, Certain Women moves very slowly without the aid of any background music to cue our emotions and can be challenging for those uncomfortable without thrill-a-minute action.
Viewers who appreciate grounded stories about resilient and intelligent characters, however, will be moved by the film's honest portrayal of real people.
He understands what the couple wants, and he says OK, but it's never clear if he grasps exactly what is going on.In the third episode, Kristen Stewart plays a young lawyer, who works in Livingston, but has taken an extra job teaching educational law to local teachers in a town four hours away.
The three stories of Certain Women are all set in and around the same small town in Montana and are also loosely connected (a few side characters show up in different segments which are more of a distraction than a convincing narrative thread).
The women of the three stories are Laura (Laura Dern) a personal injury lawyer dealing with a disabled and embittered client who won't accept that he signed away his rights, Gina (Reichardt's muse Michelle Williams, working with her fort the third time) an uptight woman trying to get the material needed for her dream home, and Jamie (newcomer Lily Gladstone, amazing), a lonely rancher who unexpectedly falls for a lawyer she meets in the strangest of circumstances.
In Kelly Reichardt's haltingly beautiful Certain Women, three seemingly disparate stories play out in Montana.
Contrast the "hardships" of their lives with those of hard-working Native American Jamie, played so beguilingly by newcomer Lily Gladstone, and it's difficult to feel much sympathy for them.In my favorite of the three stories, Kristen Stewart's character, Beth, is particularly devoid of empathy.
I'm italian and the only purpose I can see in this movie, besides wasting two hours of my life watching it, is to let me understand how empty and boring some american lives are.My message to the director: please do a favour to yourself and to everybody else and change employment, for example find a ranch and attend horses....
In each episode the development of characters is done progressively the more the story goes on as each is introduced, the first episode focuses on Laura (Laura Dern) a lawyer whom is very praised in her work place and her case is to focus on a man Fuller (Jarred Harris), who has no will of life and she has to try to make that better.
Overall Certain Women is a very quiet story that focuses on the aesthetics of passion, life, longing with a severe amount of patience and strong-willed people with flaws and human senses, it's a beautiful mix of themes in the characters and has a gorgeous mid-western setting surrounding the film, and it's as if this story came out of nowhere.
Laura Dern and Jacob Harris take up the most successful story, and Lily Gladstone (who makes a connection, whether it's fully romantic or not will be up to each audience member to decide) the most emotional, and the one that doesn't work is Michelle Williams's segment, where the story feels too flat.I don't necessarily need a lot of 'stakes', in screen writing parlance, to get through this film, but there's at least with the Dern and Gladstone stories something that is driving the story forward, something firm that they want that can make those moments where Reichardt's camera and editing take on their leisurely pace (some may want to say languid but that's not totally fair.With the Williams story, where it's about her and her husband visiting an old friend (who may have lost some of his memories) and seeing to get some rocks or stones for their new home, it feels too slight to be substantial, at least to me.
I understand in the slimmest terms what it connects to the other women in the story - having that constant struggle to persevere with what life gives you, whether it's a nutty client (Jacob Harris' character, one of the best things about the film, which may be ironic depending on what you look to get out of it) - but there still wasn't enough *there* there in such a brief number of minutes.It may sound like I'm hard on the film, but it's only because Kelly Reichardt is one of the most singular and beautifully low-key voices in American independent cinema, regardless of gender.
Certain Women seems to me like the sort of production that used to be much more common at the Sundance film festival in the 1980's, albeit with more of a "name" cast here to an extent, where the focus is about characters facing deceptively simple but significant dramatic obstacles in their small town lives, whether it's finding a connection to another person (Gladstone to Stewart, the former gives an amazingly restrained performance and all the better for it in her context, Stewart too though she's mostly oblivious to any stronger feelings from the other character), or unable to connect (Dern to Harris).
For us, the combo of Kelly Reichardt's terse visual style and Maile Meloy's subtle, affecting stories of Montana life was irresistible.The first two episodes flit by pretty quickly, like pages from an indie sketchbook, and don't have all that much impact, tbh: A small-town lawyer (Laura Dern) has to intercede when a difficult client (Jared Harris) tries to take the law into his own hands; a couple (Michelle Williams, a Reichardt standby, and James Le Gros) pay a call on a neighbor (Rene Auberjonois) who has a heap of sandstone on his property they covet for the house they're building.In the third, and most substantial episode, a shy ranch girl (Lily Gladstone) wanders into an adult ed class "because I saw people goin' in" and imprints on the teacher (an unglamorous Kristen Stewart).
Not much is said, and very little happens, but this final episode leaves you with a very strong feeling--almost more like a real-life experience than a movie--of the loneliness and isolation of this beautiful, empty country.
Certain WomenThe problem that itches throughout the course of these kind of movies is that it focuses on separate characters individually and the audience might not have the reason to hold on to it all the way to the end if there is nothing binding them all but still the writer-director Kelly Reichardt's attempt is plausible as the first hour runs by smoothly.
In rural / small-town Montana, three stories interact: a lawyer (Laura Dern) seems unable to set boundaries with an ex-client (Jared Harris) who is unhinged and deranged; a rather uptight woman (Michelle Williams) tries to find motivation in building a new home even though her husband and teenage daughter are growing more and more distant from her; a young rancher (Lily Gladstone) is infatuated with a recent law graduate (Kristen Stewart) who arrives in her town twice a week to teach an educational law night class."Certain Women" is written and directed by Kelly Reichardt and based on short stories by Maile Meloy.
It doesn't seem as though indie darling Kelly Reichardt will be changing her directing tact anytime soon.Becoming well known for her intimate, slow-moving and character driven character studies (that more often than not star Michelle Williams), Reichardt's film aren't for everyone but there is often a quiet power to Reichardt's stories that can't be denied.Hitting a peak with lost dog drama Wendy and Lucy and losing her way with the sleep inducing female driven western Meek's Cutoff, Certain Women is middle of the road Reichardt that see's the Florida born filmmaker examine the lives of 3 separate women in the American state of Montana, each going through their own various journey's in this great big world.There's barely an ounce of character development or backstory as we're thrust into these women's everyday lives, from Laura Dern's lawyer Laura dealings with Jared Harris's potentially dangerous client Fuller, Michelle William's hardworking mother and wife Gina and Lily Gladstone's The Rancher's strange fondness for Kristin Stewart's class instructor Elizabeth and while these women's stories are intriguing to a sense, there's never a good enough set-up or reward to truly make this intertwining story truly memorable.As per usual with a Reichardt film, Certain Women looks great in a quietly poetic way and the acting is universally good, without ever delivering any big character moments or situations for Reichardt's cast to shine at their brightest levels but it's hard to fully invest yourself into a film that feels rather emotionally cold and a problem that sometimes manifests itself in such narrative structures, some of Certain Women's most interesting plot points seem to end as we're thrust back into another characters life, making us feel as though we're being a little ripped off by a story that had more to give us.Final Say – Reichardt's ponderous and deliberately paced drama will be a treat for her small yet passionate fan base while for the rest of us, Certain Women is a well-intentioned and finely acted drama that never hooks us into its world in a way that would've made it more readily accessible and easily recommendable.2 ½ short-legged farm dogs out of 5.
Three key stories of women didn't catch my attention so I felt myself like I was watching some rough material work for some reason.
A very pro women movie to be certain but for the stories it told, things made sense and never felt preachy.
Oh wait, yes, the woman in the third story had a crush on Kristen Stewart's character, a lawyer, who worked in the same town as Laura Dern, though not even at the same law firm.