Premiering at Sundance to a wave of critical acclaim, Certain Women was later picked up by IFC for distribution and they've recently released the first trailer. Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, whose patient portraits of the American northwest tend to inspire either passionate love or cool indifference, it stars acting goddesses Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and newly-minted demi-goddess Kristen Stewart. Reichardt's last film, Night Moves, was more on the propulsive side but Certain Women scales things back, adapting three stories from Maile Meloy's collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.
Having seen Certain Women back in June at the Sydney Film Festival, I can tell you that this one of those movies concocted in a laboratory just for your enjoyment. Collating and cross-charting the experiences of four women under different kinds of duress, the film is impressively performed and crafted. On the awards side though it isn't going to gain much traction outside of the Independent Spirit Awards. It's not that it's difficult, but it definitely asks you to fall into its river and let the current take you.
Le's break down the trailer after the jump...
Yes
Guess we'll just start at the beginning.
- LAURA DERN!
- MICHELLE WILLIAMS!
- KRISTEN STEWART! (Honourable mention to her capacity to rock knitwear.)
- And perhaps, most impressively, newcomer Lily Gladstone, who manages to outperform all three, though she is, admittedly, given the most emotionally immediate material. If I ran the world, she'd be a lock for Supporting Actress.
- Certain Women co-stars James Le Gros, Jared Harris and Rene Auberjonois, which is a good batch of character actors to round this out.
- The cinematography here shows loving views of pastoral and mountain landscapes as shot by Christopher Blauvelt, who also shot Meek's Cutoff, Night Moves and the underrated The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby as well as completing The Bling Ring after mentor Harris Savides' death.
- The gorgeous melancholic tone. It's immediately reminiscent of Reichardt's past work, but also of the Nicole Holofcener/Mike White school of delicate but fiercely intelligent introspection.
No
I wonder how much more might be buried here?
- It's awfully hard to find anything that screams 'no' here, but the trailer maybe reads as too vague about the characters and what their stories are.
Maybe So
It's so lovely to think that if I were a man people would listen and say, "Okay." It would be so restful.
- Is this trailer playing too hard for an audience it knows it can get rather than trying to cast a wider net of interest? It stops right when you start to feel like you're getting a sense for the characters. I could see this alienating some people.
- Everyone I've talked to, whether they loved Certain Women or not, tends to have a different favourite strand of the story. But consensus says that Michelle Williams' is the most obtuse, even though I thought it a necessary contrast to the other two. This trailer doesn't - and maybe can't - really hint at what makes that section of the story so compelling. Hopefully audiences will be enticed to find out.
Even having seen the film, I'm still a massive YES for this in the sense that I'm utterly desperate to see it again. It hits cinemas in the US beginning October 14th. Will you have a ticket opening day?