[Making art in all its everyday glory: In their latest movie
together, Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt paint a
portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘SHOWING UP’ REVIEW: A STRESSED ARTIST BEFRIENDS A WOUNDED PIGEON
IN KELLY REICHARDT’S FEATHER-LIGHT COMEDY  
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David Erlich
May 27, 2022
Indie Wire
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_ Making art in all its everyday glory: In their latest movie
together, Michelle Williams and director Kelly Reichardt paint a
portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work. _

'Showing Up', Film Affinity

 

_EDITOR’S NOTE: THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE
2022 CANNES [[link removed]] FILM FESTIVAL. A24
RELEASES THE FILM IN THEATERS ON FRIDAY, APRIL 7._

“First Cow” may not have been anywhere _near_ as
soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet
frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying
to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared
for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt
[[link removed]]’s latest film about
desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, _a
fowl_, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up
[[link removed]],” a slight knowing smile
of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland
ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing
an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite
career.

The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has
to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people
die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin
plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college. The bad news
is that a _deadline_ might be even more distressing for certain
types — namely, an insecure sculptor whose landlord (Hong Chau) is
so busy rocketing to local fame with her large-scale installation work
that she doesn’t seem to care about fixing the hot water.

And while Lizzy (Michelle Williams) doesn’t love feeling like
she’s on the losing side of a semi-imagined creative rivalry, what
really grinds her gears is the vague suspicion that Jo (Chau) isn’t
just a better artist, but also a better person. When her cat mauls a
pigeon within an inch of its life, Lizzy’s first inclination is to
throw the mangled creature onto the street with the explicit
instruction to “go die somewhere else.” When Jo finds the helpless
thing on the street approximately eight seconds
later, _her_ reaction is to scoop it into a shoebox and start taping
up its wing as Lizzy pretends like she’s never seen it before.

Jo’s rescue appears to be a spontaneous act of kindness, so then why
does it seem to land on Lizzy as a performative show of spite? For one
of Reichardt’s characters — some worse off than others, but all of
them stranded in a country whose promise seems impossible to share —
it stands to reason that artistic frustrations and personal
resentments would circle each other like wagons on a long trip to
nowhere. Then again, art doesn’t necessarily have to be loved in
order to be worth making, and something loved doesn’t necessarily
have to be made in order to feel like art.

Light as a bird fluttering along to the flute pieces that Benjamin
plays in support of Ethan Rose’s score, “Showing Up” can be
insubstantial in a way that makes the 80-minute “Wendy and Lucy”
feel like a David Lean epic in comparison, and unhurried in a way that
makes “First Cow” feel like fast food. There are no bad parts, and
yet even the best ones are barely there. But, with almost
imperceptible force, Reichardt’s film gradually discovers the
strength required to nudge Lizzy out of the circular rut where it
finds her at the start. As one character puts it: “Things usually
get done. Just not on time.”

Reichardt’s animals have a funny way of forcing people into a final
confrontation with their solitude, and while that’s not _not_ the
case in “Showing Up,” Lizzy is seldom alone. When she’s not
chasing after Jo for help with her hot water, she can often be found
doing admin work for her mom (Maryann Plunkett), also an artist, at
the arts college she used to attend, or paying a visit to her artist
brother, Sean (“First Cow” star John Magaro), whose ongoing
struggles with mental illness don’t make it any easier for Lizzy to
stomach the family line that he’s the “genius” of the group.

In fact, Lizzy is typically only alone in a literal sense when she’s
working away in the garage studio where she makes her spindly little
sculptures (created by Portland-based artist Cynthia Lahti), which are
just as jagged and bent out of shape as the woman molding them. But
once Lizzy volunteers to look after the pigeon while Jo is off
becoming a star, she’s got company even then. It coos a lot.

It goes without saying that Lizzy and her wounded new friend will have
an effect on each other, though anyone familiar with Reichardt’s
work — now more relaxed than ever, her protagonist moving forward
with the subtlety of a continental drift — will rightly anticipate
that effect to be somewhat incidental in nature. Indeed, “Showing
Up” is characteristically attuned to the almost imperceptible impact
that people (and animals) have on each other without even realizing
it; the way they shape, friends, family, and perfect strangers just
by, well, showing up.

Williams’ performance is so unforced and implosive that it can seem
like showing up is all she really had to do, but it’s extremely hard
to make acting look this easy — to play an entire symphony of notes
in the span of a single octave. On screen in almost every frame of the
film, Williams inhabits Lizzy as if simply letting the character move
through life as she did before we met her and probably always will,
pushing her through each scene like a lint roller that’s gradually
accumulating small resentments. It becomes hard to tell which bits are
new, and which were already there.

Jo may not be aware of (or responsible for) the outsized effect she
has on Lizzy’s sense of self, just as Lizzy — the self-appointed
glue of her family, despite always being stuck to herself — may not
pick up on how she pushes her relatives apart through her efforts to
hold them together. And yet, for better or worse, the mutual influence
these people have on each other is as real as a thumbprint in raw
clay, and as inextricable from who they are on their own as art is
from life or life from art.

It’s a phenomenon that “Showing Up” alchemizes into low-key
resentments and unfussy encounters, some more entertaining than
others. On the one hand, Chau’s prickliness helps enliven a movie
that often seems on the verge of losing interest in itself or growing
too heavy for its “nothing to see here” tone. On the other,
Magaro’s pitiable character adds sudden weight to a film that
isn’t always ready to carry it, even though his purpose eventually
reveals itself with such novelistic panache in the climactic scene
that I wanted to find Reichardt after the credits rolled and apologize
for doubting her vision.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and
damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, “Showing
Up” is transformed by its finishing touches. The pieces that emerge
are warm and alive and bring people together to appreciate them while
eating small plates of cheese; they serve their purpose, whatever
their questionable impact on Lizzy’s career. I’m reminded of the
scene in which Lizzy brings the pigeon to a vet, who re-tapes the
bird’s wing and gives it right back to the artist. “That’s
all?” Lizzy asks. The vet shrugs, as if unsure what else they were
supposed to do. “Yeah. It’s a pigeon.”

* Film
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* Film Review
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* 'Showing Up'
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* Kelly Reichardt
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* Michelle Williams
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* Cannes Film Festival
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