"The Thursday Promise" Is the Quiet Film of the Summer
Kelly Reichardt's eleventh feature is her most patient, and her most generous.
Reichardt's films have always rewarded the audience that arrives early and stays through the credits. This one demands it.
The film
The Thursday Promise, which premiered at Telluride and opens in limited release this weekend, is a two-hour, two-minute story about a woman in her late fifties returning to the small Oregon town where she was raised. The plot, such as it is, concerns the sale of a house. The film is about everything the sale of a house forces a person to notice.
The performance
Michelle Williams, in her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, delivers a performance that is, in the ordinary sense, almost nothing — a series of small looks, small silences, small decisions made in the doorway of a room she used to sleep in. It is the best work she has done since Manchester by the Sea.
What the film asks of you
Reichardt's economy of shot is, by now, familiar. What is different here is a kind of formal generosity: long takes held past the point where a lesser director would have cut, ambient sound left in where the score used to be, faces given time to arrive at the emotion the scene requires.
Score
8.9 out of 10. Reichardt's best since Certain Women, and possibly her best full stop. Not the film to see when you are tired. The right film to see the morning after.
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