The Best And Worst Of The 2016 Sydney Film Festival, Reviewed
Sorry, the movie about Daniel Radcliffe's farting corpse is a bit of a stinker.
The Film That Will Make You Want To Go On A Long Quiet Walk
Certain Women, dir. Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, Lily Gladstone
Reviewed by: Glenn Dunks
Acclaimed director Kelly Reichardt is known for her quiet examinations of those in society who are unhappy with their lot in life and who yearn for something better, particularly titles like Wendy & Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff which focus primarily on women. Certain Women is Reichardt’s sixth feature after the recent eco-thriller Night Moves, and with it she continues to refine her style down to its bare essentials. With a distinct lack of flash and extravagance, Certain Women is a triptych about four women whose lives intersect in only minor ways and yet share a defining weathered dignity in the face of struggle.
The movie opens with Laura Dern as Laura Wells, a lawyer who is having an affair with a married man while struggling to make a male client comprehend the facts of his case (in a way no male lawyer would have to, as seen in one of the movie’s best sequences), which builds to a clueless act of violence. We then follow Michelle Williams’ Gina, a wife and mother whose efforts to bring her splintering family together on a weekend camping trip become increasingly strained. Lastly, there is Native American actress Lily Gladstone as Jamie, a reserved horse-trainer who becomes infatuated with a night school teacher, played by Kristen Stewart in some the best mom jeans you’ve ever seen.
All four of the principal actors feel perfectly at home within the shivering confines of Reichardt’s vision. The filmmaker’s look at the idiosyncratic relationships formed by those in this isolated region of the country is something that is rarely seen on screen and they are only enhanced by the film’s technical merits in which the unfussy, unvarnished steady landscape shots and a naturalistic sound design confirm her characters’ loneliness. Adapted from the short stories of Maile Meloy, these characters are richly textured, deeply human, flawed individuals whose struggles feel both unique and yet all too familiar to anybody who has felt alienated by a world that seems eager to push them down. I could listen to them talk about life and love and the complexities to human frailty for several more hours.
Some may criticise Certain Women as too slow, too quiet, and not about anything substantial. But the authenticity that Reichardt brings to the lives of these women is its greatest asset. They are not the sort of people we usually see movies made about and that is something to cherish. The film is a gem that continues the streak of one of contemporary American cinema’s finest onlookers.
For fans of: films that definitely pass the Bechdel Test, intense drama, feeling many things.
Opening in Australia: TBC
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