CHICAGO — The Florida-born filmmaker and Bard College film professor Kelly Reichardt makes beautiful movies about harsh conditions. In the singular early 19th century Oregon-set “First Cow” and now with her newest work, the disarming seriocomedy “Showing Up,” Reichardt pays attention to lives lived, often precariously, just above a fraying safety net. She’s attuned, in other words, to circumstances most every other filmmaker in America prefers to tune out.
“Showing Up” counts as Reichardt’s ninth feature, if you include her early, 48-minute “Ode,” inspired by the Bobbie Gentry song “Ode to Billie Joe.” It’s her fourth collaboration with the actor Michelle Williams, and the new film returns Reichardt to Portland, Oregon, where the 59-year-old filmmaker lives when she’s not teaching at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. “Showing Up” marks the director and screenwriter’s sixth film working with her friend, author and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond.
Williams plays Lizzy, a talented, yet-to-be-discovered sculptor facing a deadline. Her gallery show opening is days away; her face, more and more, rests at the intersection of preoccupation and frustration, while she works away, or tries, in her apartment rented from her enviably blase artist landlord (Hong Chau), likewise prepping for a gallery opening. “Showing Up” accumulates many small slings and arrows in its process-oriented narrative about how work gets made under everyday pressures.
