These are three tangentially connected stories. Laura Wells (Laura Dern) is a lawyer struggling to explain to her client Fuller (Jared Harris) his unwinnable case for the last eight months. One meeting with a male lawyer and he accepts it. He's angry and he goes off. Gina (Michelle Williams),Ryan Lewis (James Le Gros),and their teen daughter are living in the woods as they build their house from the ground up. The couple tries to buy sandstone from their neighbor Albert (René Auberjonois). Ranch hand Jamie (Lily Gladstone) happens upon an adult night law class taught by lawyer Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart).

There is a nice uncomfortable disturbing vibe coming from Jared Harris. That's why I don't understand why Laura would go to him. The cops may not care about a defense attorney but she should know better. It's hard to empathize with smart people doing stupid things. At least, the first story goes somewhere. The second story is not as compelling. I might be missing something but it's a misfire. The third story has an obvious end point and it becomes a matter of waiting for the climax. Feeding the animals is not cinematic enough to make the waiting compelling enough. The final meeting is pretty poignant although the actress needs to do some bigger acting at the appropriate moments. The first and third stories could be expanded into a more cohesive movie. There is a contemplative aspect to tying these stories together if only it could illuminate more the point.

This is two thirds a affecting and effective anthology drama about women and how they deal with other men and their own gender. Laura Dern and Jacob Harris take up the most successful story, and Lily Gladstone (who makes a connection, whether it's fully romantic or not will be up to each audience member to decide) the most emotional, and the one that doesn't work is Michelle Williams's segment, where the story feels too flat.

I don't necessarily need a lot of 'stakes', in screen writing parlance, to get through this film, but there's at least with the Dern and Gladstone stories something that is driving the story forward, something firm that they want that can make those moments where Reichardt's camera and editing take on their leisurely pace (some may want to say languid but that's not totally fair.

With the Williams story, where it's about her and her husband visiting an old friend (who may have lost some of his memories) and seeing to get some rocks or stones for their new home, it feels too slight to be substantial, at least to me. Maybe in the original story it's based on there was more to the character descriptions so we could get in their headspaces, or if it made up an entire feature length story we could dig deeper. I understand in the slimmest terms what it connects to the other women in the story - having that constant struggle to persevere with what life gives you, whether it's a nutty client (Jacob Harris' character, one of the best things about the film, which may be ironic depending on what you look to get out of it) - but there still wasn't enough *there* there in such a brief number of minutes.

It may sound like I'm hard on the film, but it's only because Kelly Reichardt is one of the most singular and beautifully low-key voices in American independent cinema, regardless of gender. Certain Women seems to me like the sort of production that used to be much more common at the Sundance film festival in the 1980's, albeit with more of a "name" cast here to an extent, where the focus is about characters facing deceptively simple but significant dramatic obstacles in their small town lives, whether it's finding a connection to another person (Gladstone to Stewart, the former gives an amazingly restrained performance and all the better for it in her context, Stewart too though she's mostly oblivious to any stronger feelings from the other character),or unable to connect (Dern to Harris). That it showed at all at Sundance is swell, though I do wish more films like this were being made/released.

Kelly Reichardt wrote and directed this triptych of a screenplay set in Montana, based on a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy. Reichardt is known for slow-moving plots and prefers character studies to fill out her often lugubrious narratives. In each of the three segments that constitute Certain Women, Reichardt's protagonists are women who attempt to maintain a quiet dignity despite being stifled by people devoted to blocking their self-actualization.

In the first segment, Laura Dern plays attorney Laura Wells who is unable to shake off disgruntled client Fuller (Jared Harris),who seeks to re-open a civil suit but has been informed by both Laura and her attorney colleague that he has no legal leg left to stand on. When Fuller takes a security guard hostage at his former place of employment, Laura is called in by the local police to act (in the unlikely scenario) as hostage negotiator. When Fuller lets the security guard go and asks Laura to give him a head start as he scurries out of the back of the building, Laura immediately informs the police of Fuller's whereabouts, and he's placed under arrest.

In the second and least successful of the segments, Michelle Williams plays Gina who is married to Ryan (James Le Gros). Gina is constantly annoyed with her husband who appears to indulge their rebellious teenage daughter. Gina has placed herself in charge of building a new family home out in a rural area—all she has to do is convince Albert, an elderly family acquaintance, to part with the sandstone on his property which she would like to use in the construction of the new home. Albert tentatively agrees to selling the sandstone and soon afterward, Gina's workers come to take possession of it. But when Gina waves to him as her stares out the window from his home, he doesn't react. Did Gina intimidate him into doing something he didn't really want to do? This is perhaps the only real ambiguity in Reichardt's "what you see is what you get" narrative.

The third segment features Jamie (Lily Gladstone),a young Native American ranch hand, who stumbles upon a continuing education class on educational law taught by attorney Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart). Beth amazingly travels four hours each way to teach the class and Jamie ends up taking an immediate liking towards the moonlighting attorney. Soon afterward they go out to eat a couple of times at a greasy spoon but eventually Beth fails to show up at the class, much to Jamie's chagrin. Jamie discovers that Beth stopped teaching because she could no longer tolerate the travel time.

Jamie decides to make the four hour drive to see if she can find Beth. When she finally tracks Beth down, they have a brief conversation but nothing comes of it. Lonely Jamie makes the trek back to the farm. End of segment.

Certain Women is very loosely interconnected by a few plot strands. Laura has been having an affair with Gina's husband, and Beth happens to be employed in the same building where Laura works.

If you can't stand lugubrious plots, Certain Women is an immediate "no-go." In terms of character development (the area where Reichardt is supposed to shine),that part of the narrative is also exceptionally weak. None of the three protagonists has much of a discernible internal arc, except maintaining the aforementioned "quiet dignity." One wonders what to think of Laura and Gina—their egos are intact and they seem to accomplish their goals—despite the obstacles put in their way (in Laura's case, it's resolving her "bad client" problem; with Gina it's consummating the sale of the sandstone and moving ahead in spite of her husband and daughter's "bad attitude"). Yet nothing much happens except for the quiet satisfaction of weathering a few not very dramatic opponents.

The case of Jamie is a bit different. She's the only protagonist who doesn't get what she wants, and is perhaps the only "sad sack" of the three. Sad sacks unfortunately don't make for good drama so when Jamie arrives back home, we're forced to revel in her failure.

If you must see Certain Women, see it for the plush Montana landscapes and the capable acting on the part of the principals. Unfortunately, good parts for women in the cinema today remain hard to come by. Certain Women certainly fails to contribute to such a pantheon.