Kelly Reichardt has carved out a heroic corner for herself, as a quiet warrior-queen of true American indie cinema, in film after film, from Old Joy (2006) to First Cow (2019), making the stone-cold case for hold-your-horses present-ness, vexed interiority, and stories the size of a real week of your life. With her new film Showing Up, she’s finally made a movie about herself, as a working artist– except it’s not about filmmaking, it’s not an ego trip, and it’s not at all heroic. It is as much a miniature as any one of the three stories in her film Certain Women (2016), but it expands in your head afterwards, like an encounter you had with private people you’re still trying to fully understand.
Michelle Williams, whose temperamental gravity and troubled glare Reichardt has capitalized on in three previous films, stars as Lizzy, a tightly-wound thirtysomething loner who defines herself as a sculptor, but whose life seems to be in a frustrated holding pattern, largely out of her control. We piece it together detail by detail, and none of it seems calculated: she crafts female clay figures – her “girls” – in relative obscurity, using a garage as a studio, and otherwise paying her rent with a desk job at her alma mater art school, overseen by her mother (Maryann Plunkett).
She’s hurriedly, anxiously prepping an exhibition of modest pieces she hopes will shake off her career’s inertia, just as her got-it-together landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), sets up two simultaneous exhibitions of her huge, garish, attention-getting found-materials installations. But life is always throwing sand in Lizzy’s gears: she has to sneak showers at school because she has no hot water at home; her cat mauls a pigeon that Jo decides to rescue, uploading the responsibility for its care on Lizzy; her father (a tolerable Judd Hirsch; Reichardt does not let actors indulge) drifts through an irresponsible retirement. And, most of all, her brother Sean (John Magaro) is a…
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