Watching Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, and Michelle Williams’ Lizzy attempting to fit her art into a routine that kept being interrupted by the minutiae of life, I kept thinking about Wendy and Lucy. It’s my favorite film of Reichardt’s, a masterpiece about the harrowing effects of capitalism, told through the story of a woman and her beloved dog. The central drama of that film is that Wendy, who is trying to make her way north to work in Alaska, does not have the resources to keep her only companion – and that loss is truly horrifying, especially in light of other characters arguing that she shouldn’t have a dog if she doesn’t have money. It’s such a focused story, entirely carried by a magnificent Williams.
The stakes seem lower in Showing Up, where Lizzy is housed and works as an assistant for her mother on an art school campus (the film is mainly shot at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which was closed in 2019). Her life is less precarious than Wendy’s, but Reichardt is telling a story about the creation of art by an artist who has not made it in the sense of being able to pursue it full time. She has to steal time away from her other commitments, a process that becomes more difficult in the rush of trying to finish her pieces before an impending exhibition at a small gallery. Lizzy is a sculptor, creating small (and affecting – her pieces are made by ceramist Cynthia Lahti) figurines of women, tenderly glazed and then fired at the shared college kiln. Her interrupted practice is juxtaposed with that of her landlord, artist Jo (Hong Chau, who is having some kind of year). Jo has “figured it out”. She has a passive income stream through renting property to other artist and can devote herself to her room-filling yarn sculptures (created by Michelle Segre) full-time. While Lizzy is preparing for one small exhibition, Jo is filling two galleries, spending days to ensure that everything is set up right. While Lizzy struggles to steal time away from her life to finish her sculptures in her studio, Jo is thriving, and also frustratingly refusing to address the lack of hot water in Lizzy’s apartment.
Williams plays Lizzy’s constant frustration with the interruptions to her art with acerbic perfection. She resents Jo, maybe for her shortcomings as her landlord (although the closest they ever come to an out of conflict is when Jo reminds Lizzy that she doesn’t pay that much rent), maybe for her privilege of creating art full time. She feels that all these intrusions are targeted somehow, almost like a conspiracy, to keep her from finishing her pieces. Her father, concerningly, appears to have fallen into a weird co-dependent relationship with two boarders (a great small role for Amanda Plummer), who laze around his coach and tell him that his coffee has run out – but when warned that he is being used, he seems perfectly content with the company, and happy to have given up pottery for the small pleasures of retirement. Her brother appears to be drifting towards a mental breakdown, and her mother still insists that he is the genius of the family, in spite of the fact that his only creation in the film is a series of holes he digs in his backyard. When her pieces are finally finished and ready to be fired, one of them gets scorched in the process, and she defeatedly insists that this is the one step in the creation of her art that she has absolutely no control over (a very chill André 3000, who plays the college worker responsible for the kiln, insists that the imperfections add character).
The most brilliant and absurd distraction comes in the form of a pigeon though. Mauled by her cat (a whole character in the film, in a true feat of cat acting) after accidentally flying into her bathroom through an open window, and then unceremoniously shoved out of that window at night (she knows it’s the wrong thing to do), the bird turns into an almost Poe-esque reminder about crimes haunting those who commit them. Of course, Jo finds the injured bird, and decides to nurse it back to health. Of course Lizzy, very grudgingly, becomes a co-parent who soon takes that responsibility much more seriously than Jo does, taking the pigeon to the vet (paying a lot of money for the advice of adding a hot water bottle to the box to keep it warm and happy), carrying the box around with her to work, and eventually forming a deep attachment to it. She is too distracted to even notice the praises that a visiting a highly praised artist heaps on her work, or the opportunity that may arise from that artist bringing her own gallerist to Lizzy’s opening.
Reichardt intercuts the film with short vignettes that show the students at the college creating a wide variety of art, which weaves an incredibly rich tapestry – the same faces show up at gallery openings, as if to hint at the countless untold stories that unfold in the background of Lizzy’s struggle. Something about the community we see depicted here feels deeply lived in (in an early scenes, some background characters discuss how much they're looking forward to a Quasi show - Janet Weiss has been the location scout for many of Reichardt's films).
If the central conflict of the film is life irritating art, the conclusion that the film forces Lizzy is about how life always triumphs in the end, and it’s where the meaning comes from, even when it appears to conspire against her. There is a beauty even in the chaos that her gallery opening turns into, where her father shares embarrassing anecdotes with no sense of social decorum and her divorced parents begin bickering, and a curious child happens to set the bird free, so that it flaps though the small space, finally healed. The film ends with Jo and Lizzy, walking through a street surrounded by warehouses, discussing another artist – clearly friends, in spite of everything.
2022, directed by Kelly Reichardt, starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, André 3000, Lauren Lakis, Judd Hirsch, Amanda Plummer, Ted Rooney.
