If Kelly Reichardt is known as anything as a director, it’s her keen eye as an observer, her ability to create understated and convincing environments that are in and of themselves so immersive that the push and pull of narrative seems secondary. Moreover, her grasp of the importance of minutiae – such as the taste of cream in period bovine drama First Cow – finds that story can be found in the tiniest of components. Sometimes, such as in eco-drama Night Moves, action is the shadow of what is to come, rather than what is depicted.
But observation is not always enough, and that seems true with the perfectly presented but oddly hollow Showing Up. Set in the world of small-time artists in Portland, it functions as a well-crafted portrait, but leaves wide open the question of why Reichardt chose this particular subject matter.
That she chose longtime collaborator Williams for their fourth film together is little surprise, this time casting her as Lizzy, a ceramic artist in the sub-subsistence level of creativity. She keeps body and soul together (scarcely) through a menial office job at the private art institute run by her mother (Plunkett), then returns to the home she rents from fellow artist Jo (Chau), who uses her own slightly more successful career as a good excuse to be a slumlord. She doesn’t have time to fix Lizzy’s hot water but does have time to scavenge a tire to turn into a swing in her backyard. Meanwhile, Lizzy, who has to scrounge showers from friendly galleries, is caught between her bureaucrat mother and her free-spirited (read, immature and narcissistic) potter father, played with gusto by Hirsch. Meanwhile, her brother (Magaro) is headed for a full-scale psychotic break, while the rest of the family treats him as the real, if erratic, genius offspring.
At times, Lizzy verges painfully close to pastiche, a shambling, grumbling figure in shades of grimy beige, as worn out as her yellowing Crocs. At others, she is genuinely empathetic, especially after she becomes caregiver to a wounded pigeon – a broken-winged intruder who swiftly becomes a window into the exact dynamics of her relationship with Jo. Yet Williams plays her with such purposeful understatement that she becomes constrained by her own restraint, as all the while her friends, family, and colleagues live in obliviousness. There’s at least a hint from Williams that Lizzy understands her own shortcomings, but that’s the nearest anyone comes to an epiphany.
The end result feels authentic, but oddly purposeless. Reichardt regularly cuts to the young, unnamed, and voiceless students at the art school creating their own works, tenderly ministered to by affable kiln tender/flautist Eric (Benjamin); yet there’s never any real juxtaposition against the grinding mediocrity of Lizzy’s existence. Are they being set up for exactly the same kind of prolonged failure as she is? Or can they aspire to what we are told is Jo’s level of success? Not that it’s altogether clear where Reichardt stands on that, either. Lizzy often stares with frustration at Jo’s life and career – sometimes quite literally. In one scene, at one of the two exhibitions Jo has while Lizzy can barely mount one, she has an expression of muted awe at her frenemy’s large-scale textile creations: But as she passes into the gallery, the words “Astral Hamster” are revealed in its title. Is this mockery? A vague jab at pretension? After all, it’s hard to see great inspiration in any of these works.
This is the creative industries as grind, but with oddly little appreciation for the perspiration. Artists involved in similar scenes may suffer painful pangs of recognition about the specifics of art life (especially in a running subplot about cheese), but little beyond that. This is the cinematic equivalent of a great still life of a bowl of fruit: The technique is undeniable, but it’s just a bowl of fruit.
This article appears in April 14 • 2023.
