Showing Up review: Portrait of an artist as a wayward woman

Like many of Kelly Reichardt’s previous collaborations with Michelle Williams, Showing Up is a quiet character study. In this case, filmmaker and actress have turned their attention to the understated life of Lizzy, a sculptor who is but a week away from having a gallery showing of her small figural pieces. Set in Oregon amid a small if bustling community centered around the city’s art school, Reichardt’s meditation on what it means to create and to live (and to avoid feeling like one has to choose one over the other) finds her yet again perfecting a cinema-as-short-story sensibility she’s been honing for years.

When we first meet Lizzy (Williams donning way too many shapeless skirts and shirts, not to mention an equally shapeless brown bob) she’s hard at work in her garage-cum-studio. Watercolor studies of women in various poses litter her walls, inspiration and mood board for the sculptures she’s bringing into being. Her darkened and tired eyes reflect not just a weariness about her work but a heaviness about her life that comes into focus the more time we spend with her over the course of a week. It’s not just that the admin work at the school brings her down (though it does). Nor merely the way her neighbor/colleague/landlord (that’d be Hong Chau’s Jo) exists at the intersection of support and envy. Or that her family—including a celebrated father, a doting if aloof mother, and a brother clearly struggling with his mental health—expect both too much and not enough of her. It’s that in the aggregate, all of these circumstances make focusing on the work, on the process of creating something beautiful and tangible to present, all the harder.

And that’s before her cat wakes her up in the middle of night making a ruckus while trying to ravage a pigeon that inadvertently entered her apartment. The bird, which Lizzy handily escorts out of her bathroom with a broom, becomes a metaphor for this frazzled artist once Jo shows up alongside it the next morning hoping to nurture it back to life. To say Showing Up centers on the moments in between Lizzy unwittingly caring for a broken pigeon and making sure she has enough pieces to show at the gallery is accurate. Yet, in true Reichardt fashion, the point is not the plot so much as the spaces in between what’s happening on screen.

“You’ve got to listen to what’s not being said,” her brother intones almost absentmindedly at one point in the film, and the line, with its needling faux-deep sincerity, gets at the tenor of Reichardt’s sensibility. Ostensibly following Lizzy as she trudges through her life (without hot water for weeks on end, now!), Showing Up finds time in between scenes to showcase the many arts and crafts taught at the school where Lizzy and her mother work. And where, it must be noted, Lizzy’s talent is modestly celebrated, even if she does bristle at any attempt at reassuring her that her carefully crafted sculptures are truly a wonder to behold. Those interstitial scenes, where students work on dyed fabrics and woven pieces, figure drawings and short films, stained glasses and hand-thrown vases, don’t merely punctuate the film but actually hold it together.

If Lizzy—and Jo, for that matter—are to stand in for the kind of working artist who so rarely gets to be celebrated on the big screen, it is because the focus here is neither on talent nor on “genius” but on work. Even in the moments when we spend time with Lizzy at her studio, Reichardt never lets us think we’re witnessing a moment of inspiration. She focuses instead on the tactility of Lizzy’s work, on Williams’s hands actually pressing into clay as she sculpts feminine shapes into being. Here again is where the actress’s gift for conjuring up wholly ordinary people under Reichardt’s gaze should be rightfully celebrated. Her Lizzy, who’s both prickly and yet clearly aches for a closeness she can’t bring herself to crave, moves through the world almost wanting to take up less space—as if she’d wanted to atomize her own self into her work. Ditto Chau, who seamlessly tunes into Reichardt’s Oregoncore and makes Jo not so much a foil for Lizzy as an artist in her own right whose sunny optimism is constantly trying to break through Lizzy’s more morose outlook on the world.

The final image, which finds Jo and Lizzy sharing the screen in an uncharacteristic wide shot (in a film that privileges still medium shots throughout), may not offer too much closure but it does suggest, instead, an opening up. That it comes after close to two hours of a wayward, grounded journey where we really haven’t gone far (if anywhere at all) may irk some viewers, for Showing Up is aggressively small and unassuming. Like Lizzy’s sculptures, there’s a wounded tactility at work here—in miniature, even. What you get out of it will depend on your patience for such thoughtful if prickly work, the kind that may get under your skin almost against your will and which will find you wondering whether you really did watch an entire film whose plot was anchored by a wounded pigeon, a broken water heater and, yes, a gallery showing (or two).