Showing Up
Adult relationships are hard, and the relationship with the self is hardest of all. It would be too much to say this is the core of all of Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams’ four collaborations together. Other films have been as much about the relationship with nature in a way Showing Up is not, but all of them ultimately return to the self and the need to understand it before being able to enter the world outside. There is no guarantee of success, or even of greater awareness of personal flaws, only that time will pass, and everyone will get a little older. The only real success is showing up at all.
Portland artist Lizzie (Williams), for all her introspection, has not yet realized that. Preparing for a major, potentially career altering exhibit, all of her attention is focused inward leaving her oblivious to her fraying relationships with her friend/landlord (Chou), her mother, her eccentric neighbor (Benjamin). It’s not until life literally crashes into her in the form of a wounded bird Jo passive aggressively forces her to care for that the idea there is more to life than her personal neuroses even occur to Lizzie. Alternately pushing those close to her away and wondering why she is doing so; Lizzie tries to get herself ready for her show while facing for the first time the question of why she makes her art in the first place.
Ensconced back in the Portland suburbs, Showing Up has all Reichardt’s characteristic touches. The pacing is deliberately slow in a story that is focused on slow character revelation (and maybe change) rather than plot. The unexpected intrusion of nature on Lizzie’s life is symbolic arrival for the opportunity of grace if not change, an opportunity by no means guaranteed to be taken up on. Although returned to the present day from the wild valleys of First Cow, Reichardt’s last film, Showing Up is if anything wilder and further from civilization. Full of heavy silences expanding on the visual distance between characters that cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt keeps looking for, Reichardt’s typical slow examination of characters in their spaces is magnified even as the time is stretched.
On the one hand that provides plenty of opportunity for Williams to bounce off the world around her and show Lizzie’s subtle facets even as she seems to do very little. Even more introverted than her lone homesteader, Lizzie seems to be listening (but not hearing) the characters around her without ever interacting with them, but her face tells a different story. The small moments of emotion and reaction seeping in is some of the best acting of the year already and proof of Reichardt’s theory of minimalist filmmaking. It’s also something not every story can sustain; the further from nature she gets the more the stories seem to need. The film has become the wounded bird trapped in a cage, full a meaning inside of its small world but surrounded by an increasing wilderness.
None of that can hide that fact that Showing Up is as fascinating and intricate a character study as Reichardt and Williams have managed. It lacks the growing tension of Meek’s Cutoff or the poetic naturalism of First Cow, though not for lack of trying, but with patience and effort it does have its own pleasures to unveil. At some point it feels inevitable that we will reach the edge of too little but it’s not here yet. Until then Reichardt and Williams have once again delivered us something we can glory in.
7/10. Starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, John Magaro and André Benjamin. Directed by Kelly Reichardt.