In “Showing Up,” Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a ceramicist who spends her days locked in her art studio molding clay into delicate figurines – lovely, yet warped women, their bodies twisted into strange postures, their limbs sticking out at odd angles.
We spend long stretches of Kelly Reichardt’s new film watching Lizzy shape and paint “her girls,” as she calls them. These sequences feel patient, laden with something akin to tenderness as Lizzy labors, often long into the night. In one sequence, she breaks the arms off of one of her statuettes so she can stick them back on somewhere else. “Sorry,” she says softly to the figure as she gingerly tears the limbs from her body. Sometimes, you care so much that you have to break things.
Reichardt’s new film takes long, lingering looks at all aspects of art and craft, not least of all the painstaking process of creation. But it also strives to find a connection between the effort you put into your art and that you put into your life, and where the line between them lies.
Inside all of the meticulous work we see Lizzy engaging in, there’s a tremendous amount of care – a type of care she rarely shows to anyone outside of her girls. That’s what jumped out at me most about “Showing Up” – this idea of what it means to care for something or someone. Sometimes, caring means taking a pigeon with a broken wing to the vet, or checking in on your semi-estranged brother who lives alone. Other times, you want to scream, you want to cry, you want to break something, because even if you don’t want to, you can’t help but give so much of a damn. Reichardt, who co-wrote and directed the film, uses her singular visual style and patient, subtle storytelling to paint a portrait of friendship and artistic anxieties.
At the beginning of “Showing Up,” Lizzy is not interested in making friends, or forming close bonds of any kind. All she wants to do is create. She’s getting ready for a show, growing more and more exasperated at the obstacles she finds in her path. Her day job, working at an art school, takes away from her time in the studio. Two drifters have seemingly moved in with her father (Judd Hirsch), and she worries they’re taking advantage of him. Her brother Sean (John Magaro) has essentially stopped communicating with her and is dealing with mental health problems of his own, an issue her divorced father and mother (Maryann Plunkett) don’t seem particularly concerned with. And her landlord and fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau) is also getting ready for a show – and has subsequently left Lizzy without hot water for much too long.
The stakes in “Showing Up” are much smaller than they are in many of Reichardt’s films, which are often characterized by western, unknowable terrain. While “Showing Up” does take place in Oregon, its landscapes feel more familiar – the quiet intensity of an art studio, the soft bustle of a school, the dreariness of a quiet night at home. “Showing Up” is certainly Reichardt’s funniest film, but there’s a deep root of pain at its center, one that feels intensely recognizable and almost more potent because of how inconsequential everything is.
She may not be working within the context of awe-inspiring mountains or desolate wastelands, but Reichardt and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt treat every frame with the same level of reverence. There are long sequences where the camera barely moves, allowing us to get the measure of a character as they go in and out of frame interacting with the world around them. The camera stays trained on Lizzy, or Jo, or any number of other artists, showing us just how much precision and time goes into their craft – precision and time that some of them might not lend to other aspects of their lives.
The phrase “showing up” can mean a lot of things; showing up to do the work, or showing up for other people. It can also mean trying to be better than someone else, trying to show them up. Lizzy’s relationship with Jo constitutes all three meanings and forms the heart of the film – a complex heart wrapped up in layers of resentment and respect. “Showing Up” is a friendship movie, through and through. It harkens back to the great cinematic friendships, all the way from “Casablanca” to “Toy Story.” And, like every good friendship, one friend is more reluctant than the other to engage.
Lizzy is our point of view character, and Williams plays her reluctance to form close relationships with an unsettled tinge. The performance is quiet, but it’s not still. Williams has an unpredictable quality to the tension in her physicality that puts you on a knife’s edge as to how she’ll react in any given moment. It’s part of what makes the long artistic sections feel so refreshingly zen. During those moments, Lizzy finally settles into herself, completely content in her work. Those moments in the studio are the only moments you see the character in any state of calm.
Jo, on the other hand seems content in every sense of the word. She goes out for beers after work, everyone loves her art, she throws parties for her friends, and she spends her free time finding the perfect tire for a swing rather than fixing her tenant’s broken water heater. Everything seems to come easy to her in a way that it doesn’t for Lizzy. Lizzy, whose care for anything outside of her work comes with a sense of anxiety. Lizzy, who would rather spend time caring for her girls – her beautiful, broken figurines – than consider caring for the broken people around her or herself.
When Jo finds an injured pigeon outside of her and Lizzy’s building, the bird starts to bring the question of showing up to a breaking point. Jo initially passes off the bird to Lizzy for a day that ends in a trip to the vet and yet another work day wasted for the disgruntled artist. But Lizzy slowly grows used to the animal, to its peaceful coo echoing around her studio. The bird becomes a proxy for all the people Lizzy finds it so difficult to care for, particularly when there’s the threat that they won’t care back. A bird with a broken wing can’t run away, or ignore your calls, and you don’t have to worry about whether a bird with a broken wing will come to your art show – you can just bring the bird. Maybe it is easier to throw ourselves into our work and take people out of the equation altogether rather than risk the chance that people won’t like us back. Maybe it’s easier to show how much we care through our commitment to our work, rather than really show it to the people who need to know.
So often, Reichardt likes to leave you out in the cold when a film ends – unsure which way is up or down, a sort of unmoored feeling that leaves you unclear as to where you’re headed. “Showing Up” sure doesn’t give you a clean cut answer. But there’s a wistfulness to its questions that leave you looking up. Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Who knows. But we might be on our way.
“Showing Up” is playing at this year’s Atlanta Film Festival on April 23. You can purchase tickets here.