the mastermind (w&d kelly reichardt)

This is going to be a shaggy dog story, I thought to myself, as the fetching titles unwound. A nod to those seventies crime caper movies, all fixed camera long shots, revealing details that might or might not be crucial for the story, demanding the viewer’s attention. The eminently likeable Josh O’Connor planning a heist, with more and more obstacles thrown up, just as the script gurus would have recommended. No point making a heist movie without speed bumps. As things continue to unravel for O’Connor, who carries on being likeable, O’Connor can’t help being likeable even if he’s robbing old ladies, the movie seems to have two possible directions: a happy ending as he succeeds in somehow reconciling with his family or a tragic denouement where he ends up estranged from them forever. Reichardt subverts this dialectic by coming up with a third outcome, what I would term the Bergman-ending, when you just drop out of the story altogether before engaging with that irascible third act. This could also be termed the Shaggy-Dog-Story ending, which I don’t recall the script doctors ever promoting, but has its advantages. Reichardt has frequently sought a way to ovoid the straitjacket of narrative conventions. In The Mastermind, with its portentous title, perhaps there is a sly critique of this idea of perfection, the notion of the perfect crime/ the perfect script/ the perfect film. 

meek’s cutoff (d. kelly reichardt, w. jonathan raymond)

Reichardt’s western is a beautiful, immersive take on what it might have been like to be a pioneer on the great trek west. It’s a film of elegant long takes, punctuated by moments of classic western action. The appearance of the Indian, the stand-off, the runaway cart. A party of pioneers finds themselves lead by Meek, a cowboy cowboy, who talks the talk but doesn’t appear to walk the walk, leading them into barren hills as their water reserves diminish. Under the parasol of the question: will they survive or not, the film stumbles forward in their company, with every obstacle that holds up their progress hardwired into the viewing process. An axle breaks and the audience really gets the significance. A steep hill isn’t just scenic, it’s potentially fatal. It’s a masterly treatment of the lost art of the Western, one which unsurprisingly forefronts gender as Michelle Williams emerges as a counterweight to Bruce Greenwood’s macho Meek. However, Reichardt’s treatment of gender is in many ways just another element in the authenticity of her tale, one which insists on a more nuanced take on the historical actualities of the myth. 

certain women [w&d kelly reichardt]

Reichardt’s movie has that neat trick of putting high wattage stars in low wattage roles. Dern, Stewart and Williams play underwhelming, small-town figures in three very loosely connected vignettes. Their stories are whimsical and ephemeral. There’s no great drama, indeed in the Williams strand there’s barely any drama at all. The film is more concerned with the process of observation. A precise study of a few women in a particular moment of their lives. Of the three stories the film consists of, the third is by far the most compelling. This the Stewart strand. Perhaps this benefits from the fact that Stewart herself isn’t the predominant character. Rather it’s Lily Gladstone, playing a ranchhand who looks after horses and develops a crush on Stewart’s lawyer. In contrast to the other two stories, this one has a sense of development and pathos. Reichardt’s pacing is deliberately slow, and this rhythm comes into its own in the shots of Gladstone going about her work as she looks after the horses. We understand the tedium and loneliness of her life and engage completely with her sudden passion for Stewart. It’s a lovely performance and the advantages of letting the camera linger, and letting the narrative breathe, helping to accentuate the performance, come through. It feels as though, in the other two strands, Reichardt is reaching for this level of transcendence, without quite achieving it. Certain Women is only a frustrating film in so far as it hints at the possibility of something more profound than the film it eventually became.