***½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch
written by Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt
by Angelo Muredda “You’re ruining my work day,” Michelle Williams’s sculptor Lizzy whines to her cat Ricky early in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, which might be the most incisive portrait of the artist working from home to date. Its mundane, thoroughly lived-in depiction of Lizzy’s domestic puttering among companions, both animal and human, under the clouds of an upcoming show, a slow-burning family crisis, and a few weeks without hot water, hits particularly hard post-COVID, even as Reichardt takes pains to emphasize the comforts and support that Lizzy enjoys as compared to the more precarious outsiders in films such as Wendy and Lucy. Originally co-imagined with frequent collaborator Jon Raymond as a film about post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr becoming a landlord to pay the bills (before Reichardt realized Carr’s outsized fame in Canada was roughly equivalent to Andy Warhol’s in the U.S.), Showing Up has been retooled as, improbably, a contemporary comedy–a mordantly funny look at the myriad push-pull interactions between art, commerce, and communal obligation. That tangled mess, Reichardt’s assured film suggests, makes it a wonder that any art gets made at all, let alone that anyone shows up to honour either the work or the people who make it.
Lizzy is a Portland artist who makes sculptures of women and girls in motion (actually the work of Cynthia Lahti) while holding a day job as an administrator at a local art school, working under her mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett). As she keeps reminding her aloof father, Bill (Judd Hirsch), and paranoid brother, Sean (John Magaro), she’s on the verge of an opening, her stress about whether anyone will turn up exacerbated by the fact that her more successful friend and landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), who is in no hurry to fix the water heater, is about to open two shows. Adding insult to injury, Ricky has mauled one of the pigeons who lay about in her garage watching her work. As quickly as Lizzy ushers it out on a broom handle in the night with the cruel advice to die someplace else, it’s found very much alive in the yard by Jo, who adopts it and mends its wing only to immediately pawn it off on the frazzled Lizzy, tasking her with managing the Punch and Judy show of a preying cat and wounded bird from her home studio.
No stranger to films about the delicate ties that bind humans and animals, Reichardt beautifully underplays how this animal disruption throws Lizzy’s already precarious work/art life balance off-kilter, such that she has to turn the sick day she took from work to finish her sculptures into a pigeon hospital visit. Herself an artist who moonlights in higher education to pay the bills, teaching film at Bard College, Reichardt is a sympathetic but unsparing observer of Lizzy’s foibles, inviting us to marvel at the way artists have to pick up and set down their work on the fly amidst distraction without losing sight of the smallness of creative work in the scheme of more existentially pressing matters like Sean’s apparent mental deterioration, not to mention the pigeon’s brush with death. Although most of the people in Lizzy’s orbit are other artists who’ve similarly turned to teaching, administration, or property management to make a living, we get one pointed view from the outside when an unimpressed veterinary tech cuts through Lizzy’s complaints about her lack of hot water in response to a suggestion that she leave the pigeon with a warm bottle for comfort. “Do you have a stove?” she asks, to which Lizzy can only sheepishly admit that she does.
Williams is very funny here as the preternaturally put-upon, fussy artist forced to become open to the contingencies of life, as bothered as she is easygoing in The Fabelmans. Her hair frizzy and flat from what she’s prone to calling “the water situation,” Lizzy cuts a mean and inscrutable figure as she watches the drippy movement students at her school breezing through their outdoor class, frowning from a distance as she digs into her Tupperware full of pasta salad, her expression possibly disapproving though possibly she’s just thinking about her own figures, and how much work she has left to do to perfect them. She and Chau’s Jo make another of Reichardt’s charged dyads, recalling the opposites-attract, furtive partnerships of First Cow and Old Joy, as well as Laura Dern’s exasperated lawyer and exasperating client Jared Harris in Certain Women. Introduced in a playful tracking shot that sees her joyously rolling a tire down the sidewalk before she fashions it into a tire swing in her yard, Jo is an open and freewheeling touchstone to the more anal-retentive Lizzy. Reichardt, who also edited, lands a droll visual joke early on from the juxtaposition of Jo eagerly inviting Lizzy to push her on the tire swing to her view, in the next shot, of the now-abandoned entrance to her yard, where Lizzy has unceremoniously ditched her mid-conversation.
These tensions around the women’s comings and goings, alluded to by the cheeky title, culminate in the marvellously well-executed centrepiece of Lizzy’s opening in the last act, a set-piece that gathers most of the cast (save Ricky) in a confined space as Lizzy fretfully monitors both the cheese plate and the door. There’s a deftness and an ease to Reichardt’s cuts across the room, the way she flits in and out of small groups’ conversations and quick looks at the fruit of Lizzy’s labour without losing sight of the central relationships she’s subtly built throughout. This grand finale lands like a more relaxed version of Noah Baumbach’s recent mannered screwball comedies while also playing improbably like a Portland-set spinoff of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”. Reichardt returns to her environmentally-anchored, regionalist wheelhouse in the closing moments, her camera looking up to power lines, trees, and sky as the women exit the gallery space in search of their winged pal, who’s newly taken flight. It’s that lightness of tone and openness to comedy, nascent in works like Certain Women but more developed here, that makes this a lovely curio for Reichardt–an artist who, like Lizzy, is set in her ways yet open, perhaps by necessity, to branching out.
