Showing Up: Funny, Contemplative Indie Has Heart to Spare, Plus Michelle Williams
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A-
You don’t watch a Kelly Reichardt movie as much as you enter into it.
She has a knack for making movies that make you feel like you’ve plopped yourself down on the couch at a friend’s house to catch up on the latest. In other words, she eases you into the world of her movies in a quiet way.
Her latest Showing Up, which was in competition for the Palme d’Or at least year’s Cannes Film Festival, is a lightly comedic movie that centres around Lizzy, played by her frequent collaborator Michelle Williams as lead, Lizzy.
Lizzy is an artist preparing for a show that’s opening in just over a week. She has a day job at the local arts college, working in the administration office, where her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett) is her boss.
After work, Lizzy comes home to her apartment on a quiet leafy street, to her cat Ricky, and to her art studio in the garage. She makes small female figures in clay. Lizzy is not a big talker. She seems perpetually preoccupied and a little worried or glum.
In any case, Lizzy has some reasons to be grumpy.
She rents an apartment from a fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau) who does installation art and is also preparing for the opening of not just one but two shows. Lizzy’s water isn’t working and Jo — who is preoccupied with her own work and cheerfully self-absorbed — doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get it fixed for her.
That’s about as deep as the outward tension goes in Showing Up. The movie follows Lizzy through the week leading up to her show. She goes to work, comes home, and works on her pieces. She takes her work to Eric (a radiantly charismatic André Benjamin a.k.a. André 3000), the school’s kiln master, to get them fired in time for the show. She must wait and see if they come out of the kiln the way she hopes they will.
She visits her slightly eccentric father (Judd Hirsch), a retired ceramic artist who has an eccentric couple of Canadian snowbirds staying with him (Amanda Plummer, Matt Malloy). She looks in on her brother Sean (John Magaro), also an artist who is bipolar.
Some things go the way she’s hoping. Some things don’t. There are never really any major dramatics. The feeling of the movie is more like Lizzy coping with daily life.
And yet the genius of the film, of the way Reichardt and her longtime co-writer Jonathan Raymond have structured the story — the way Williams handles Lizzy’s lightly cranky attitude — is that we’re really drawn in, as if we’re sitting at the table just on the other side of the camera, part of this little community of artists.
This is the fourth time that Reichardt has cast Williams as her lead (see also Meek’s Cutoff, Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women), and they seem to have perfect synergy. Lizzy doesn’t say much, and we wait a long time before we see a smile from her, but this is where we can really see how strong Williams is. She gives Lizzy such complexity without ever seeming forced.
The performances are natural, which contributes to that ‘go with the flow’ feeling. And yet, as always with a Reichardt film, the light tone, that sense of the nothing is really happening, is deceptive. In this quiet, casual, incremental way, we start to feel the lives of the characters, and the way they’re intertwined.
Showing Up is a movie that whispers, and yet when it ended, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Lizzy or to the other characters in her world, to the sunny leafy streets of Portland, to the free spirit vibe of the art school, to the relationships I just started to get to know. I wanted to see more. I still want to.
This is indie filmmaking at it’s best.
Showing Up. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Written by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathon Raymond. Starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, Judd Hirsch, and John Magaro. In theatres April 14.