by Jason Adams
The worlds that writer-director Kelly Reichardt grants us access to with her movies are special places. Even if they’re filled with terrors, as they very often are – her wonderful 2013 eco-thriller Night Moves is not as out of place as it might initially seen – they’re all so delicately spun you might find yourself not breathing lest the spell be broken. The grace on display in her work is meditative, plaintive, lovely even in the most dire of straits. They are quite simply always one of my favorite places to visit.
And her latest titled Showing Up, which reunites Reichardt with actress Michelle Williams for the first time since 2016’s Certain Women, is another wondrous, delicate world – one I know I’ll be returning to time after time, year after year, to soak in, to absorb whatever wonders and mysteries I can from someone whose view of existence I’m thankful for receiving every single damn time...
Here Williams is playing a Portland sculptor named Lizzy... who is hard at work on a new show, set to be unveiled in a few days. We watch as her figures, which are mainly female and whose poses tilt between the balletic and the uneasy, all spackled with an aggressive colored glaze, come together – as she’s proven time and again Reichardt knows there is no greater pleasure than in watching people do work which they are good at. Think back upon watching the duo making those delicious oily cakes in First Cow, and when you’re done slobbering all over yourself imagine that deliciously methodical sensation applied to sculpture. That’s what we have here. And Williams, ever a wonder, has clearly done the work to come across as a convincing sculptor, and so the absorbing process of simply watching her work becomes its own incremental delight.
It also, as any good or bad artist knows, comes filled with its own inherent tension. Absolutely anything could go wrong at any given moment. A misjudged flick of the finger, a pet cat jumping onto a desk, an oven that’s a little too hot on one side. The intangible that art strains for is mired in the tangible, with all-too-real roadblocks popping up at every pass. Watching Lizzy maneuver through a few days of varying-sized obstacles as she strains toward some sort of expression of self amid such small whirlwinds is, when it comes down to it, one of the purest representations of what it truly, practically means to be an artist that I have ever seen. There’s no need for grand histrionics when there’s an injured pigeon dropped into the first act like Reichardt's version of Chekov’s Gun -- we all stand one flap away from disaster.
And Lizzy’s life is full of such pigeons. Her neighbor and landlord and lightly-competitive fellow artist Jo (Hong Chao, once again killing it) has her own show (excuse me, shows plural) to put on, and so Lizzy’s broken water-heater’s been put on the back burner. Lizzy’s grasping toward showers, any working showers anywhere, is a whole process unto itself and a good punchline whenever it lands, but also searingly relatable to anyone who's ever stunk without their consent. Meanwhile Lizzy’s parents Jean (Maryann Plunkett) and Bill (Judd Hirsch, who must’ve come over from The Fabelmans set alongside Williams) are estranged and not making anything easier for her, and her brother Sean (the great John Magaro, back with Reichardt after helping to make those triumphant oily cakes in First Cow) seems to be coming undone in his own fashion.
It’s easy to see how in another director’s hands all of these complications could be turned up to eleven, straining for farce-like comedy, but Reichardt never strains a single inch. When things are funny they are always genuinely so, and you’d best believe that Williams can wring a belly-laugh from a simple reaction shot, a simple slump of her shoulders. And Showing Up is funny, and it is genuine. And it knows and shows that all we can do is maneuver our way through the world’s endless messes one small scratch in clay at a time. And if we’re lucky there’s something of us, tangible and lovely as this, that makes it out the other side.