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.
