Showing Up Review: Art of Life

Kelly Reichardt’s films, across genres and period settings, have negotiated the required capital for even the most modest means of day-to-day survival—to the point where returning to a more superficially low-stakes milieu is like a jolt. Showing Up drifts freely through a Portland art school and its surrounding community, though at its center is a sculptor, Lizzie (Michelle Williams), who’s finishing a series of figures for a gallery show. Lizzie is a fount of frustration, as her peers seem to garner more success and gain stability without even working half as hard as she does. Refreshingly, there are no arbiters of success in sight—no gallery owners, no critics—so the show is an isolated and tangible goal of self-actualization in and of itself.

Showing Up is very much keyed to Lizzie’s seemingly immovable frustrations, like being brushed off by her mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett), for whom she works at the college sculpture magazine, when she tries to affirm the importance of having the time to work: “If you need a personal day, just take a personal day,” says her mother. Williams is repeatedly decentered, as Reichardt and co-writer Jon Raymond thread Ozu-like intervals of adjacent activity throughout the film, which replicates the sensation of walking down a visual arts building’s halls, equally impressed with and confounded by the various in-progress projects.

Showing Up is a campus film in the way that John Williams’s Stoner or Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin are campus novels, steeped in its main character’s melancholic, at times enervating resignation. Lizzie is introduced working on her sculptures in her garage studio, interrupting her process to ask her old classmate and landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), to fix her water heater. Everyday battles are the film’s lifeblood, but it’s the in-between spaces—between shows, between residencies, between workdays and classes, between visits to parents—that foment its quiet conflicts. The art is both the focus but also adjacent to the larger exigencies of life.

Reichardt withholds any value judgements on art, and, in fact, compliments don’t seem to carry much significance in a film where characters are trying to suss out enthusiasm beyond their immediate peer group. Unlike Wendy and Lucy, Showing Up doesn’t pivot on its characters’ immediate survival, but its quotidian anxieties make it the more personal film, given Reichardt’s own “day job” as an artist in residence at Bard College. For most filmmakers, some sort of extra cash flow is required, usually at the behest of an at-times exploitative university culture; Lizzie’s malaise as she sits at an iMac as professors and staff mill about her mother’s office isn’t an affectation, but a perfect encapsulation of creativity being inhibited by school strictures.

The illusory romance of art isn’t drained from Showing Up—the glimpses of students’ works in progress, some silly, some focused, are heartening, and maintain the film’s celebration of creativity—so much as it’s grounded in petty, ancillary negotiations. The mutual supportiveness is more exhausted than nonexistent, having to account for varying physical scales of artwork, as Lizzie’s miniature sculptures stand in stark contrast to Jo’s extravagant interdisciplinary work (humorously dubbed “The Astral Hamster” at one of her two shows).

This casual dissonance extends to Showing Up’s status within Reichardt’s body of work, drawing upon collaborators both old (Williams, Raymond, and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) and new (most significantly André Benjamin, a.k.a. André 3000, as Eric, the school’s amenable kiln master), all effortlessly absorbed into Reichardt’s purview. The film is a cross-section of various worlds, achieved within a sphere that none of the participants actually belong to, though Reichardt and Blauvelt have time and time again produced lovely, grainy, tactile compositions of human life on screen. They are, arguably, sculptors themselves by this point.

Showing Up has a tendency toward the precious, but Reichardt wisely positions Lizzie as an observer in such moments, and in ways that speak to the film’s sense of community. At one point, Lizzie ends up toting around a wounded pigeon, acting as its caretaker, but then, almost randomly, the bird is stripped of its bandages by two little girls in the crowd at the gallery show, then tossed to the sky by Lizzie’s troubled, shut-in brother, Sean (John Magaro). In this moment, it’s understood that Lizzie put in the work but didn’t exactly partake in the outcome.

Even the most humorous and plangent of narrative turns in Showing Up works toward this decentering, these modest twists subtly impinging on the gallery show’s opening: from Sean going temporarily missing to his and Lizzie’s father, Bill (Judd Hirsch), being unwittingly saddled with a pair of mooching, bohemian lodgers. Priorities are subjective, and therein lies Lizzie’s personable frustration. Deftly, Showing Up leaves unresolved the familial, creative, professional, and interpersonal matters at its core, staying true to its vision of an artistic environment perpetually caught between modest comfort and precariousness.