Certain Women: In a Big Country, Three Stories of Promises Fallen Through

Over nearly two decades, Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff) has established herself as one of the most vital directors in contemporary American indie film. If a skeptic needed any further proof, her latest feature, Certain Women, provides ample evidence of her superb realist storytelling abilities. Adapted by Reichardt from a short story collection by Maile Meloy, the new film is an anthology of sorts, peering in on the lives of three troubled women in rural Montana, just as winter settles over the region. Small-town attorney Laura (Laura Dern) is struggling to convince a client (Jared Harris) that his work-related brain injury is not actionable. Gina (Michelle Williams) and her family are living out of a tent while her husband (James Le Gros) builds them a new house from scavenged local materials. While tending horses for the season, Jamie (Lily Gladstone) stumbles into a painfully intense infatuation with beleaguered rookie lawyer Beth (Kristen Stewart).

These three protagonists are marginally connected, creating the potential for melodramatic collisions. Yet such upheavals never occur. Reichardt presents the three tales as discrete chapters, while also underlining that they comprise a single story: a saga of women’s anxiety, disappointment, and enervation, expressed within a precisely rendered Big Sky Country setting. Each section feels ever-so-slightly distinct, genre-wise and stylistically, owing to the use of familiar indie elements—e.g., the personal crisis that ignites into criminal blundering. The similarities that wind through the women’s lives are thus all the more striking. Reichardt is assisted immeasurably by a surfeit of outstanding lead and supporting performances, perhaps the finest ensemble the director has worked with to date. Williams nimbly navigates the most subtle and thankless portrayal, but it is Gladstone’s depiction of lovelorn anguish that lingers, bestowing the whole of Certain Women with a potent aura of wounded, bittersweet endurance.