Showing Up (2022)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
“You, too, are cut for failure; not that you’d fight the world. You’d let it chew you up and spit you out, and you’d lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you’d always expect the world to be something it wasn’t, something it had no wish to be.”
Lizzie (Michelle Williams) is a sculptor in Portland. She works in the administrative office of an art school with her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett). She lives alone with her cat. Her next-door neighbor, Jo (Hong Chau), is her landlord and a student at the art school, specializing in fiber arts. Lizzie’s not an especially pleasant person, but it’s pretty understandable why. Her hot water is off and Jo seems profoundly disinterested in repairing the water heater. Lizzie’s parents are divorced and she worries about her brother, who seems to be deteriorating day-by-day. She toils away on her pieces for her upcoming exhibit while Jo, in comparison, has other people doing her work. She dons frumpy Earth tones and is struggling to just find meaning in it all. Been there, brah.
Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is easily identifiable to any art-inclined elder millennial. It’s the kind of film that boosts your self-confidence through recognition. At times it plays comically, other times I thought it to be Reichardt’s first horror film. It meets somewhere in the middle, examining a modest life; in many ways, it reminded me a bit of John Williams’ remarkable novel Stoner, a story about a Good Worker that’s defeated by circumstance and pugnaciousness. Lizzie is fairly downtrodden to begin with, and her attempts at asserting herself are often met with resistance. When her cat mauls a pigeon, she takes the wounded bird from her bathroom floor and tosses it outside. The following morning, Jo discovers the bird and recruits Lizzie to mend it back to health. She does so without acknowledging that it was her cat that injured the bird, and is tasked as caregiver despite the fact that Jo is laying claim to the bird and whatever cultural currency it provides. You get the sense that she’s a bit of a doormat, allowing things to happen to her, afraid or simply too fatigued from asserting herself. Been there, brah.
Reichardt’s always had an incredible sense of place and Showing Up is no different. Having dated a fiber artist for a brief period of time, the community we observe here feels very lived-in and accurate. It’s riddled with the kind of people that operate within their own universe, and while at times the competitiveness weighs heavily, there’s a notable degree of communal warmth here. The brief asides of the various classes that compose this art school give you the sense of artistry as an act of persistence and collaboration. And while I easily identified with Lizzie’s nihilism and sense of defeat in the face of Jo, I do think Reichardt and Williams offer the character a lot more depth than merely being some defeatist curmudgeon. She’s experienced a cumulative weight of disappointment and hasn’t had her artistry acknowledged in any meaningful way. But she keeps showing up, not necessarily hoping for a big break, but rather because it’s the one thing that does give her rotations around the sun some modicum of meaning. Truly: been there, brah.