It would be easy to damn Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up” with faint praise, suggesting that it is a little art movie for people to see in between a nap and the farmer’s market. It’s an artisanal movie made by a modern master of the small movie that’s good for you, which is often more stimulating to say you’ve seen than to watch. I admire most of Reichardt’s films, but it’s tempting to get irritated with their stereotypical art filminess — their slowness, their earnestness, their Important Themes, their plotless-ness, their sense of futility, their allergy to flash. Other qualities also peak through though, namely a subtle, finely tuned sense of rage, as well as a poignant and deep-seated interest in the need to connect with the world. Those qualities course through “Showing Up,” which achieves a fullness of expression that’s new to Reichardt’s work.
This seems to be the movie that she’s been working toward for decades, mostly in terms of tone. With seemingly simple flourishes, Reichardt wrests an entire community and artistic sensibility onto the screen. It’s a film in which a thousand touches add up to something profound and in which, underneath a controlled veneer, troubling emotions roil. Reichardt’s patience pays dividends: In “Showing Up,” she can wring more emotion out of a medium shot of a doll-sized sculpture than many filmmakers could out of an action scene or monologue. It’s about faith and attention and risk. Reichardt tends to her vision until it blooms.
“Showing Up” has an oft-mythologized subject: the working methods and habits of an artist. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is an Oregon sculptor who’s trying to finish several pieces in time for a show at a local gallery. As it is with any artist who isn’t successful enough to isolate herself from the outside world, Lizzy must contend with the litany of petty irritations that make up, well, life. The hot water in her small apartment isn’t working, and her friend, colleague and landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), doesn’t seem interested in fixing it. Lizzy runs out of cat food. Later, that cat hurts a pigeon, whom Lizzy leaves for dead and Jo rescues. Getting stuck with the pigeon later on, Lizzy becomes protective of it. Amidst everything, including a family of artists who’re battling mental issues, Lizzy whittles away at her sculptures as the show’s opening looms. The entire movie is a string of moments like these, and Reichardt’s willingness to accord them weight and respect, without wedging them within a trumped-up plot, suggest a decency that grows quite moving.
It’s not about the events, but the poetic ebb and flow of how Reichardt allows them to unfold. “Showing Up” feels alive and real, yet it’s governed by a remarkable sense of precision. If Reichardt had emphasized any scene more or less, the spell of the film could pop, leaving you with another arty character study rather than something transcendent. Take the business with the pigeon. I don’t want to box “Showing Up” into any thematic corners, but the pigeon suggests a metaphor for Lizzy’s need to give to society what she gives to her sculptures, namely herself.
Lizzy is a shuffling, taciturn, grumpy little woman who seems to be much older than she actually is, and in private moments we see how she transmits her hidden ecstasies and reserves of empathy into clay figures, who’re throwing their hands in the air or crouched down on the ground, enthralled with emotions that Lizzy suppresses in order to keep one foot in front of the other. Lizzy has a remarkable ability to take life as it comes without pitying, say, her lack of success as an artist, and it’s the source of her strange dignity. But such self-assuredness can also be used as a barrier against the world.
Anyway, back to the pigeon: It crashes into her apartment, her cat messes it up, and Lizzy doesn’t take responsibility, evading the chaos of outside life for the sanctity of her art realm, in which she simulates the … chaos of outside life. If Reichardt helped you along at all with seeing what the pigeon does for Lizzy, the impact would vanish and we’d be watching another civics lesson. Reichardt has the patience to allow this narrative pattern with the pigeon to just seemingly arise, and it feels magical.
Lizzy’s sculptures aren’t a trivial background detail for a glorified hangout movie either. Ever notice how so many movies about artists are interested in everything but their art? Such indifference isn’t Reichardt’s style. Her camera lingers lovingly on Lizzy’s figures, which are beautiful in their intricacies, in their creator’s insistence on getting the small things right regardless of who notices or cares. There’s an intoxicating scene in which Reichardt devotes at least a minute to the act of Lizzy snapping an arm off a clay female figure, and then gradually affixing two new arms, completing its range of expressions. One feels Lizzy freeing the figure from its incompleteness. Reichardt occasionally savors Jo’s methods as well. There’s an earthy, tactile, nearly erotic moment in which Jo straddles material, bending it to the desired shape.
A vainglorious movie would validate Lizzy’s distance from the world until proffering a tear-jerking ending to cover its bases. That’s the Alexander Payne method: loath your characters from a superior distance until springing convenient redemption and sentimentality at the end of your film so as to cinch those Oscar nominations. Like Terry Zwigoff in “Ghost World,” Reichardt continually challenges her protagonist’s distance from the world. The film has a shaggy glow, and characters keep popping up and surprising you. It’s evident to the viewer how much Lizzy is missing from life.
It’s moving how Reichardt refuses to turn Jo into a figure of resentment, but rather a suggestion of the open life that could be available to Lizzy if she’d unclench herself. And it’s moving how André Benjamin, as someone at the art co-op thingee where Lizzy works, sees one of Lizzy’s burned figures and casually remarks that it looks nice. His warm flippancy suggests a man who doesn’t need art to be the meaning of his life — he may have balance. For Lizzy, the burning is devastating, and this damaged figure is another of the film’s metaphors. It is art tempered by life into something that transcends its creator’s hermetic intentions. These associations flow through “Showing Up” and cross-pollinate, suggesting depth of experience.
The anger at the film’s center keeps these character-centric passages from getting too cute. A person familiar with Reichardt’s films may watch “Showing Up” and assume that Lizzy’s resignation with her art’s limited appeal is autobiographical. It’s the assumption that I made, even though I don’t know Reichardt and obviously can’t prove it. As Williams plays the role, Lizzy appears to be rejecting the outside world before it rejects her. From a lineage of art-world oddballs, one of whom is played by Judd Hirsch with his typically impeccable timing, Lizzy embraces being a cast off too comfortably. But perhaps it’s the casting off that allows her to connect so deeply with her art. Reichardt could be wrestling with some variation of this paradox, or longing. God knows that she is far more talented than most indie filmmakers du jour.
Obscure though she may still be, Reichardt is nevertheless the definitive collaborator of one of cinema’s great living and working actors: Michelle Williams. They have worked together several times over the years and each of the various collaborations is unique. Williams’ performance as Lizzy is so natural and masterly and fully integrated that it’s difficult to discuss. There’s no sense of technique on display, Williams simply is this woman, and she has a rare ability—so does Billy Bob Thornton—to change her physical appearance, unceremoniously yet radically, with posture. It’s astonishing to think that Gwen Verdon, Lizzy, and the lunatic from “The Fabelmans” all live in the same person.
It would’ve been easy for Williams to become dear as Lizzy, fetishizing the character’s discontent and isolation, but she has too much respect for the role to indulge in maudlin, audience-courting shtick. Williams understands that Lizzy at her thorniest is Lizzy at her funniest and most poignant, and she honors those contradictions. Few people have gotten onto the screen the trance that sets into an artist when in the zone, but Williams has. It’s the zone that artists yearn to enter, where they can make their ambitions material. The zone is what the artist often attempts to protect from outside life, even if outside life is the zone’s fertilizer. “Showing Up” is one of the finest movies I’ve ever seen about the struggle to be an artist and a person, simultaneously.
“Showing Up” is now available on VOD.
