Review: Showing Up

Director:  Kelly Reichardt

Stars:  Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, André Benjamin

Showing Up marks Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with Michelle Williams and the first since Meek’s Cutoff in which Williams takes centre stage. Working once more with frequent co-writer Jonathan Raymond, we’re back in the suburban locales of contemporary Oregon, on streets that look strikingly similar to those that bracketed her first masterpiece Old Joy. Here we find Lizzy (Williams), a beleaguered artist in her forties who works a day job for her mother at Oregon College of Art and Craft while preparing for her own show at a local gallery, where she hopes to display her latest collection of ceramic ‘girls’ (created for the film by artist Cynthia Lahti).

Showing Up itemises a handful of days and the trivialities that pit Lizzy’s life. Her hot water isn’t working (I’ve lived through that; it’s hell), and it helps little that her landlord is also her friend and colleague, fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau), whose attentions are also torn between upcoming shows. On the peripheries some familial concerns are diverting Lizzy’s attention. Who are these reprobates crashing on her father’s (Judd Hirsch) sofa? And what is the deal with her brother Sean (John Magaro), who appears sunk in a mire of paranoia and obsessive compulsive behaviour?

Anyone familiar with Reichardt’s body of work thus far will be acclimated to her unhurried pace and fondness for minutiae, but there’s also a perceivable looseness to Showing Up that separates it from much of her recent work. It’s there in the jagged handheld movements of the film’s opening credit sequence as an unusually roughshod camera lingers on several sketches (also Lahti’s) hanging in Lizzy’s studio. Elsewhere, a playful Jo spins a tire along a sidewalk to fashion a swing in her garden, and its about as pacy as a Reichardt shot has been since River of Grass. A relative spring in her step, there’s a little Hong Sang-soo in this one, and its a welcome element of play in the mix.

Sonically and editorially things are being mixed up, too. This is her first collaboration with Ethan Rose for underscore and, while used sparingly, his soft electronics are quite the counterpoint to Reichardt’s prior fondness for Jeff Grace’s guitar. Reichardt has edited all of her own work, and has found a steady rhythm that she’s adhered to throughout her extended late phase (everything since River of Grass), so a sudden and tremendous harsh cut some two-thirds into the picture feels comparatively seismic, used in tandem with Rose’s music to convey Lizzy’s changing perspective on her own work – a piece burned by accident in the kiln.

When it comes, Lizzy’s opening becomes an expertly played exercise in anxiety, and one can’t help but wonder if Showing Up stands as Reichardt’s most autobiographical work yet. A perfect storm of familial embarrassment, unsupervised children and feathered fright combine to create the closest this director has come to situation comedy. Still, Reichardt has just the same penchant for anti-drama as ever. This isn’t the Safdies we’re dealing with here.

After two decades making what I now feel moved to call “dog movies”, Showing Up is Reichardt’s first cat picture, and said cat is – delightfully – an asshole. Lizzy’s pet Ricky catches a pigeon that Lizzy quickly discards, only to find herself ward of its recuperation when Jo brings it over for first aid. Bandaged and warmed with a hot water bottle, the bird provides a narrative through-line for Reichardt’s diaristic observations of life in and around the arts and academia, how the two worlds intersect and sometimes cause one another friction. Again, its easy to infer that some of these incidents are culled from Reichardt’s first hand experience bridging these two worlds. As presented here, the art world – even local art – is a competitive field which generates its own hostilities, resentments and microaggressions.

And yet, the act of crafting and creating is absolutely the beating heart of this thing. In the centre of the picture Lizzy takes time to contemplate another artist’s installation. Christopher Blauvelt’s camera lingers on these pieces, conveying her appreciation. If you’re looking for a comparable auteur’s work, think of the slow rhythms of Jim Jarmusch’s ode to poetry Paterson. That’s as close as I can get to a contemporaneous muse on the act – and art – of creating.

There’s also a case to be made that this is Reichardt’s funniest – or at least lightest – picture to date. One such example that stuck out to this viewer (and I may be telling on myself here) comes when Jo brings home a man after one of her shows. In a moment of wry innuendo, Reichardt has Lizzy react by impaling one of her clay ‘girls’ right between the legs.

Broadly there’s a sense of the hereditary under the microscope, too. Bohemia, like academia, seems to be a generational pursuit, passed down through the family line. Is this commensurate with foibles as well? Lizzy can seem, at times, to be lightly on the spectrum, while the men in her family are prone to far hazier mental health. For a time I wondered if the wounded bird was meant to be metaphorical of Lizzy’s malaise. Her incompleteness. But the more pertinent facsimile for her might be the burned ‘girl’ that she includes in her show after all. Perhaps the bird is Sean. Perhaps we’re being invited to debate and decide.

Showing Up feels, marginally, like a lesser work due to its relative slightness, though that’s a phrase I use begrudgingly because all of Reichardt’s films are intimate, scaled, prone to revealing more of themselves over time. There are, as ever, minute pleasures to be found, from the ASMR of Lizzy’s ceramics scraping against the shelves as she removes them from the kiln, to the sense of pride resonant in Williams’ delivery of the affirmation, “Yeah, these are mine.” Here one hears Reichardt’s own self-satisfaction with her work. That anyone else resonates with them is likely just a bonus. This is where she’s contented.