“Will anyone show up?” is the question every artist has when putting their work on display for the public for the first time. Here is the endpoint of all that inspiration and hard work, but will anybody care? To be an artist, especially a working one, is to manage the anxiety of how something that means a lot to you will be received by not only strangers, but friends, family, and (most harrowingly) other artists. It’s the kind of thing though that seems to be very internalized by Michelle Williams’ Lizzy, a relatively inconspicuous Portland sculptor, in Kelly Reichardt’s latest indie project Showing Up. She keeps up appearances, maintains a stone-faced impartiality –but subject to the judgement of those like her artist father (Judd Hirsch) and fellow artist landlord Jo (Hong Chau), we see the insecurity beneath the surface.
Subtlety is one of Reichardt’s great specialties, and never more so than when channeled through her greatest collaborator, Michelle Williams. Whether it is her underpinning despair in Wendy and Lucy or her barely contained frustration in Certain Women, there’s always some different suppressed feeling informing her personality with searing truthfulness. As expressed here, you get the sense that Reichardt put more of herself into the movie, written once again with novelist Jonathan Raymond, because it is so interested in the creative process, and the weird little things that get in the way of it –disrupting, but also enlightening it.
Lizzy has to often leave her home studio, if for no other reason than to find some hot water for cooking and showering –her water heater is broken and Jo annoyingly keeps putting off replacing it. These episodes will take her to her job at an art school where she works under her vaguely supportive mother (Maryann Plunkett) or to her dad’s crummy old place that he rents out to a pair of itinerant elder hippies; even to the home where her eccentric brother Sean (John Magaro) –possibly with some undiagnosed psychological condition- almost seems interred. In the midst of this a pigeon gets into her house, is mauled by her cat Ricky, and subsequently nursed to health by Jo, who insists Lizzy look after it while she works –which Lizzy does reluctantly at first, only to gradually warm to the animal.
Lizzy’s life is defined seemingly by the way she relates to others –everyone in her corner of the world an artist like she is. Jo is the most significant one, her commitment, open process, enthusiasm, and understanding of exactly what she wants being something it’s easy to envy. Where Lizzy will pour over a mould, unsure what to make of it, Jo will figure out the shape of her work seemingly instantaneously and even have the confidence to leave it for a minute for another project, like hanging a tire swing in her yard. Both Lizzy and Reichardt are fascinated by Jo’s clear work, but find something arguably more poetic in Lizzy’s less structured approach, where she’ll decide on a whim a sculpture looks better without its arms or spontaneously choose a new pose for it. I think it touches something of the patient artist in Reichardt, resembles perhaps her own process -but then it resembles the process of several artists I know, who let the inspiration hit them in sometimes undefined ways. Lizzy’s impostor syndrome belies her intricate, quite interesting craft -a craft that she comes back to regardless of how dispiriting her life outside of it may look.
Because whether it’s her family drama or the dullness of her job or her many issues with Jo being such a terrible landlord burdening her with inconvenient responsibilities -Chau is excellent as this blisteringly honest ball of passive aggression, self-centredness, and ignorance by the way- Lizzy has a lot of difficult relationships and obligations to navigate and at times she seems thoroughly burnt out. It’s not the glamorous image of an artists life, it’s a difficult, realistic one, whereby she has a day job, stress, and obligations -even while some of these are characterized with a mild bewilderment. Lizzy doesn’t live in a state of constant inspiration, she doesn’t live in a place that offers much to inspire her. And she is not a person at peace with herself, drifting through a melancholy life.
Sometimes she has to come out of her shell and confront someone, sometimes she has to take a stand; and sometimes something devastating happens to her work -as it does just before her exhibition. But Reichardt seems to be looking for a kind of spiritual statement on artistry, a kind of reconciliation to the tough, long, monotonous, unpleasant aspects of working creatively. And it’s not so cut and dry as a grand statement on the purpose of art for its own sake, the transcendent value of individual expression to the human experience. No, it’s more personal what she is trying to illustrate. It’s not particularly well-defined, but then I doubt it is for her. What is clear is a certain therapeutic quality of making art, beneath all the pretensions -it’s good for the soul.
Williams plays impeccably the mindfulness of Lizzy’s work, her consideration and calm thought process. Like many a Reichardt film, Showing Up takes its time, allowing for atmosphere to dictate composition. I will say it does so less well than her other films, particularly Old Joy and First Cow, both of which invited the audience to live in their space with more immediacy. The space here isn’t all that compelling, probably because it isn’t natural -Reichardt is much more focused on subjects, which are by essence more subjective. The movie’s tone also seems a little bit constrained, especially where you can tell it’s going for a certain absurdism. There are bits, especially amongst the family, that feel a little reminiscent of Noah Baumbach’s Meyerowitz Stories, but the humour is stilted -it’s not really something Reichardt can write naturally. And it feels a degree misguided given that shroud of somberness.
The ending is quite good though; a freak accident that becomes a relieving metaphor for the end-point of the artistic process. The first time a little sense of catharsis is conveyed through Lizzy having her work out there for the world, and you feel that Reichardt has been meditating on it conceptually with applicability to her own artistry for some time. “Showing Up” doesn’t just refer to coming to see the work, as Lizzy encourages throughout, but both in being present to compose it mentally and in the art’s ability to show itself through the process aided by external influences. It’s a movie that depicts art in a uniquely down-to-earth and personal way, and it’s encouraging to know that even in its banalities it is beautiful.
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