As Good as It Gets

CERTAIN WOMEN (A) - I can't imagine a better filmmaker working today than Kelly Reichardt. She creates opaque narratives that plod and meander organically, with a visual style that slings you into the eyes, ears and the aching bones of her wandering characters.

Here she takes her cameras to Montana and surrounds herself with towering talents to tell three short stories -- tenuously linked -- about frustrated women searching for connections and purpose. Laura Dern stars in the first story as Laura, a lawyer struggling to cope with a difficult client. Reichardt regular Michelle Williams is Gina, a woman with a husband and daughter who is trying to plan her dream home outside of the city. And Kristen Stewart is another lawyer, Elizabeth, who drives three hours twice a week to teach an evening class about the law to a handful of teachers. (The script is compiled from the short stories of Maile Meloy.)

Elizabeth is worn out by the long drive, and she is frustrated by her students, who don't seem to appreciate the case law on education matters but would rather pepper her with pedantic questions related to their own workplace gripes. A lonely ranch hand, Jamie (Lily Gladstone), stumbles on the class and becomes smitten with Elizabeth, accompanying her to a local diner for a bite to eat before Elizabeth faces the dark drive home. Gladstone, a relatively newcomer, is a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, and she grounds the film in an authentic setting. Her profound hunger for a human connection is palpable and expressed viscerally through Gladstone's big eyes and smile. When Jamie impulsively takes extraordinary action to reach out to Elizabeth -- in a burst of drama that shatters the measured pace of the previous two hours -- the result is raw and eviscerating, yet crushingly run-of-the-mill. Stewart, cocooned in Elizabeth's frumpy clothes and dull personality, mopes with the best of them, and she thrums with a Millennial ennui.

Dern's Laura opens the movie in bed with a married man who has a connection to one of the other women. She drags herself up the stairs of her downtown office building to her second-floor law office to meet with Fuller (Jared Harris from TV's "Mad Men"), the victim of a workplace injury who refuses to accept the fact that he no longer has a case. Later, Fuller creates a hostage situation at his former place of employment, and Laura nonchalantly dons a bullet-proof vest and ventures inside to try to placate him. The scenes between Dern and Harris mix deadpan humor with danger and dread. A later coda carries that combination over, with a sweetness undercut by a dull fear.

Michelle Williams, who carried "Wendy & Lucy" and "Meek's Cutoff" for Reichardt, anchors the middle of the film in a seemingly innocuous meditation on domestic dysfunction. Gina and her husband, Ryan (a perfectly reserved James Le Gros), and their teenage daughter are camping out in the sticks at the site of their future house. We don't know why, but Gina is just not happy, and she bickers with Ryan and their daughter in small but unsettling ways. Gina and Ryan visit an elderly acquaintance, Albert (Rene Auberjonois), to inquire about some authentic sandstone that is piled on his nearby property. Albert is not all there, and the couple are guarded about seeming to take advantage of the old guy. As they are leaving with a handshake deal, Gina and Albert marvel at the beauty of their surroundings, presuming to interpret the words of the birds' subtly different calls and responses. "Where are you?" Albert suggests the birds are calling out. The response, with a slightly different inflection, Gina suggests, is "Here I am!" It's a pivotal moment that might warm or break your heart.

Reichardt is a master of detail, and here she wanders from her familiar turf in the Northwest and immerses herself in both the physical wonders of Montana and the provincial pinch of the suffocating small town of Livingston. In this static environment, she explores the hopes and dreams -- or lack thereof -- of four women who seems to continue to exist outside of the frames of this film. As the credits roll, you wish you could keep checking in with them long after the house lights come up.