Lizzie, played by Michelle Williams, has an office job at an art school, and she’s a clay artist getting ready for a show. To call her drab is an understatement. She wanders around in a shabby sweatshirt and pants. She walks slowly. Her voice sounds dull and stressed when her father complains over the phone that he didn’t get an invitation to the show.
Her clay figurines have more color than Lizzie. She makes small sculptures of women in dynamic postures, although the faces look old and tortured. Lizzie shapes the clay, then glazes and fires the figures. She’s pretty good, but she shows no feeling about what she’s doing.
In part, 'Showing Up' is a spoof of life at an art school. Among scenes of students making sculptures and batik, weaving and painting, bits of pretentious conversation waft across the movie. A teacher blathers about the spontaneity in a pot as Lizzie eats a grim homemade lunch out of a not-artistic plastic bowl. Lizzie looks out at some young dancers swaying awkwardly to a flute in a meadow. A woman nearby comments on the scene, "I can’t figure out what class this is, but I really want to join it."'
Other minor dramas unfold around Lizzie as she gets ready for her show. Her neighbor and landlord Jo (Hong Chau) hangs a tire swing from a tree, trying to ignore Lizzie’s complaint that she has no hot water. Lizzie’s cat catches a pigeon, which gets away only to be found injured by Jo, who makes Lizzie care for the bird because it was Lizzie’s cat who did the damage. Lizzie winds up lugging the convalescing bird in a box wherever she goes. Lizzie frets that her father has invited some freeloaders to stay at his home, and Lizzie’s self-absorbed and maybe mentally ill brother is staying remote and not answering his phone.
Lizzie plods through her life and her world. Compared to the hundreds of films about artists, 'Showing Up' lies somewhere south of the usual levels of disturbance. If you think about Van Gogh cutting off his ear, or the jazz musicians who get hooked on drugs and have to get clean, or ballet dancers with bizarre hallucinations – 'Showing Up' is not in the same cinematic world. A hurt pigeon or a mildly annoying father do not rank with all those movie artists cracking up. But it's a playful thought that art does not come from wild emotions and events; maybe art also comes from people in baggy khakis and gray sweatshirts whose major life problems are lukewarm showers.
Even the title comes with no fanfare. 'Showing Up' is a lot less provocative than 'Lust for Life.'
Writer/director Kelly Reichardt typically takes unexpected directions. Her 2010 western 'Meek’s Cutoff' is about a wagon train in 1845 that takes a dangerous direction. 'First Cow,' another sort-of western from 2019, is about a grubby guy in a mining camp who makes elegant French pastry, from milk he steals from the only cow in the area. Reichardt is one of the good filmmakers right now, and it’s right in keeping with her singular ways of seeing that she presents a movie about an artist with none of the usual hyped-up crises. Like her films, the art in 'Showing Up' comes without fanfare or hoopla. Making art is what otherwise average people do – some of them are industrious, some pretentious, some have talent, and some don’t. Lizzie lives with familiar family problems. It's sad that there’s not much joy in her life. But her art has spirit and feeling, and so does this quietly comic movie.
Film times are availablehere.
