More than once in "Showing Up," her wry and wonderful new movie, the director Kelly Reichardt gives us something that feels rarer than it should in American cinema: a lingering moment in the presence of an artist at work. Not a famous writer pounding self-consciously away at a typewriter, cranking out page after page of voice-over-excerpted masterpiece; not a genius tackling a blank canvas that will, a few scenes later, be a gorgeous finished painting. Lizzy (Michelle Williams), the artist we're following, is a Portland-based sculptor of limited means, modest aspirations and no particular reputation. But her work is lovely and expressive and not to be hurried — not by her own process, which is assured and meticulous, and certainly not by the camera peeking quietly over her shoulder.
For minutes at a time we are seated with Lizzy in her upstairs office or in the garage that serves as her studio, where she shapes clay into figures of women (some in repose, some in motion), sets them aside to dry and, sometime later, applies daubs of paint to their fixed, hardened contours. We watch her fingers as she delicately snaps off one sculpture's arm ("Sorry," she whispers) so as to match the other, forming her own little Venus de Milo. We follow her gaze as she studies, appraises and, with a frown, corrects her work. In time these challenging but deeply fulfilling sessions will come to an end, and Lizzy returns to the outside world with its mounting pressures, anxieties and irritations, longing for nothing more than to return to her sculptures. That frustration, Reichardt knows, is part of being an artist too.
And what frustration! Lizzy is racing to finish in time for a solo exhibition, a looming deadline that the universe seems bent on ensuring she misses. "Showing Up," Reichardt's eighth feature (and her latest of many co-written with Jon Raymond), is also her first that might be termed a comedy, albeit one in which the humor arises from a familiar, exquisitely Reichardtian spirit of rigorous observation and rueful insight. Like some of the other women Williams has played in the director's movies — a lowly young drifter in "Wendy and Lucy," a brave 19th-century traveler in "Meek's Cutoff" — Lizzy is moody and solitary by temperament, someone who places little faith or trust in other people. And while the various distractions that pile up at the worst possible moment are recognizable situational archetypes — the annoying friend, the plumbing mishap, the unexpected guest — they are also intricately linked, utterly plausible examples of how life can get in the way of art.
Let's take them in order. The annoying friend is Jo (a pitch-perfect Hong Chau), a more extroverted fellow artist whose mixed-media installations, soon to be proudly displayed at not one but two upcoming shows, easily eclipse Lizzy's art in conceptual ambition, visual range and public awareness. The plumbing mishap compounds Lizzy's stress and her resentment: Jo also happens to be her landlady, and she's been either too busy or too flaky to replace a broken water heater. (Lizzy wants to finish her sculptures, but what she wants even more, and never stops grousing about, is a hot shower.) And then there's the unexpected guest: a downed pigeon that Jo discovers outside their building, and which she and Lizzy take turns nursing back to health.
The introduction of a poor wounded bird might prompt an initial eye-roll, for all the reasons you fear a poor wounded bird would be introduced: perhaps to soften a protagonist's heart, or to serve as a clunky metaphor for personal healing. But Reichardt is never obvious, and in her previous films about human-animal relationships, most recently the marvelous "First Cow," she has always seemed more captivated by material realities than metaphorical implications. She also has zero interest in sanding down her characters' rough edges. The care and quiet companionship that Lizzy shows her feathered friend, who's tightly bandaged and kept in a newspaper-lined cardboard box, arises partly from a sense of responsibility, but also from a practiced caretaker's instinct. This isn't the first time she's given up her time for others.
In her Oscar-nominated recent performance in Steven Spielberg's "The Fabelmans," Williams brought a shattering emotional transparency to the role of a wife and mother who sacrifices her art and her passion for her family's well-being. The sister and daughter she plays in "Showing Up" may be a more naturalistic, tamped-down figure, but with her reproachful silences and occasional bursts of fury, she illuminates a different variant of the same condition. Lizzy hails from — and gives up a lot for — a family of artists, and the degree to which her personal and professional aspirations have been entangled with theirs has proved more of a deterrent than an encouragement.
From time to time Lizzy checks in on her artist brother, Sean (John Magaro), who is mentally ill, tends to disappear without warning and treats everyone around him with alarming belligerence. Elsewhere, Lizzy spends a lot of time playing the mediator with her divorced parents: her free-spirited father, Bill (Judd Hirsch), a retired potter with unretired delusions of bohemian grandeur, and her brisk, impatient mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett), who's all but indifferent to her daughter's creative aspirations. It doesn't help that Jean is also her boss at a local art college, where Lizzy spends her days toiling away in an office and facilitating, as always, the artwork of others.
How does a serious-minded artist get taken seriously — or even find the time to pursue her calling — in a context where art is no big deal? And where the exercise of one's imagination can be dismissed as a blandly unimaginative, even conformist gesture? Lizzy seems to ponder that question as she wanders the campus, watching the students as they embrace their work with a youthful freedom that you suspect she herself has never enjoyed. (These scenes were shot at the since-closed Oregon College of Arts and Crafts.) Like so many Reichardt films, "Showing Up" evinces a gentle, unforced wonderment at all the things people can do and create with their hands. The cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt, steers the camera through panoramas of bustling activity and intense concentration, showing us students braiding and weaving, operating neon-lighted installations, sketching nude models, dancing in the grass and basking in the Portland sunshine.
Reichardt spent many years as an art professor, and there's an unmistakably personal dimension to these caught-on-the-fly digressions. Her vision of young artists at work manages to be at once gently satirical, genuinely admiring and blessedly quotidian; there's a sense of artmaking as both a rarefied activity and work in the truest sense. And as with all work, it's apt to produce more disappointment than triumph, as we see when one of Lizzy's sculptures gets scorched in the kiln operated by her campus colleague, Eric (a lovely André Benjamin). When he tells her, "I like imperfections," he isn't just trying to cheer her up; he could be expressing Reichardt's own point of view.
Lizzy herself is nothing if not an endearingly imperfect creation, and while she's used to being ignored, patronized and underappreciated, "Showing Up" knows better than to reduce her to an object of easy pity. The decency and consideration that she tries to project into the world, and resents others for not showing her in return, go hand-in-hand with a pessimism about human nature that may be ungenerous, but is not necessarily unearned. Reichardt, for her part, extends compassion in all directions, and crucially toward both sides of Lizzy and Jo's difficult, passive-aggressive dynamic. It's hard not to sympathize with Lizzy's exasperation at Jo's flightiness, her unarticulated jealousy over Jo's popularity and success. It's also hard not to warm to Jo's more open and upbeat spirit, or to understand her reluctance to answer the phone when Lizzy calls to complain for the umpteenth time about the plumbing or the damn bird.
Is it the pigeon that does the showing up of the title, or could it be the two random acquaintances (Amanda Plummer and Matt Malloy) whom Bill takes into his home as part of his late-life crisis? Could "showing up" be read in the competitive sense, describing the sting that Lizzy must feel when Jo's accomplishments overshadow her own? I prefer the more generous reading: It's about who will turn out to be firmly on Lizzy's side when all is said and done, and at the most anxious and fraught moment of her creative life. The answer surprises her as well as us, and it brings this wincingly funny, stealthily emotional movie to a conclusion that feels both casual and momentous. Sometimes being there makes all the difference. Sometimes showing up is enough.
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'SHOWING UP'
Rated: R (for brief graphic nudity)
Running time: 1:48
How to watch: Now in theaters
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