by John Guerin
I could not have predicted that in a movie starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, and Michelle Williams, a performance by relative newcomer Lily Gladstone would leave me the most affected. The best short film of 2016 is the third act of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, in which Jamie (Gladstone), a solitary Montana rancher, falls for Beth, an out-of-town lawyer (Stewart), who is stuck teaching an educational law night class four-hours away from her home in Livingston. Stewart, unsurprisingly, adds another formidable performance to her collection of direct yet remote modern women, but the revelation here is Gladstone, who contributes a sensational breakthrough performance that deserves The Academy’s attention...
One frosty night, after all her horses have been tended to, Jamie, by some combination of loneliness and weeknight boredom, drives into town and casually finds herself sitting at the back of Beth’s dreary classroom. Something about Beth — her cryptic attitude, evident disarray, or jumbled expression — activates Jamie’s desire and sparks a compulsive fervor. Gladstone’s face practically glows while watching Beth lecture about teachers insurance, and when Beth agrees to join her at a diner after class, Gladstone watches her eat with the intensity of me watching Nicole Kidman’s Birth close-up. Gladstone is constantly, quietly strategizing, measuring how much excitement to effuse or decoding signals in Stewart’s preoccupied exchanges. After one evening class, Jamie brings a horse to pick up Beth, like a knight rescuing her princess. The look on Gladstone’s face is so euphoric that it enables us to infer the newness of feeling this moment has spurred. In this scene and in so many others, Reichardt’s brilliant direction confuses the straightforward motives of both characters, but such uncertainty is also the result of Gladstone’s expert emotional modulation, confounding ideas about queer desire and evading the very validity of such claims. Does Jamie “want” Beth in a traditional sense, or might she want to be her? Does she even know what she wants? Is this love or a welcome reprieve from the mundanity of ranching? Would this high-strung lawyer give her any attention under different circumstances?
When Beth suddenly quits the class, Jamie makes the long drive to Beth’s town that same night and searches for her until finally catching her arriving to work the next morning. In a devastating scene, Jamie realizes her investment in Beth is almost completely one-sided. As Beth, previously distracted by work stress, begins to process this near-stranger’s spirited attraction, Jamie swims to the edge of her own desires and is forced to confront a much different outcome than she had imagined. I mention Kidman in Birth because here Gladstone, in a softer register, creates her own radiant portrait of a woman lying to herself, not from the result of some supernatural delusion, but from assuming that attention is attraction. Watching her experience such a blow reminds us of her luminous repression in earlier scenes, but the luminosity has been shattered and the repression only deepened upon Stewart’s clear and unequivocal rejection. Jamie may recuperate from this missed connection, but I myself can think of few characters from 2016 that occupy my thoughts more than this lonely, pining, and finally lovelorn rancher.
In an almost silent performance, Gladstone conveys a level of muted intensity wholly comparable to Liv Ullmann or early Hollywood icon Janet Gaynor. Her knack for carefully expressing a host of emotions through tiny details played across the face would make Julianne Moore proud. Gladstone possesses a strange majesty and remains in complete control of Jamie’s unruly feelings. Her eyes alight like magnetic fields as her voice slips with veiled excitement, signaling immense heartache through careful calibration. Her performance requires us to pay a great deal of attention to the detail and implication laid out across her expressive face, but the final result is a nothing less than a vigorously full-bodied creation.
more on Certain Women | more from John Guerin | Supporting Actress Oscar Race