Showing Up (2022)

Director and cowriter Kelly Reichardt’s latest, her first feature since 2019’s First Cow, returns both to present-day Portland and to Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a sculptor with a day job and a mostly unsatisfied life. Unsatisfied, but not without reason. Her hot water heater is out and her landlord Jo (Hong Chau), also an artist, is too busy and/or preoccupied with herself to take care of it. Her brother Sean (John Magaro) is mentally ill and her divorced parents—Jean (Maryann Plunkett) and Bill (Judd Hirsch)—are not inclined to recognize it, let alone do anything about it. It also seems likely they have neglected or downplayed Lizzy and her ambitions. They maybe aren’t the greatest parents. In one fraught scene, Jean tells Lizzy, obviously not for the first time, that Sean is a genius. He has just gone missing. Lizzy is fighting for equilibrium in all this as she prepares for a gallery show no one else in her life seems to care about. She has to push to get the show together in and around her day job, a significant breakdown of her brother, and a pigeon that her cat caught and harmed in the middle of the night. As in Wendy and Lucy, an innocent animal—this pigeon with a broken wing—delivers a lot of the deflected emotional weight here and certainly a payload of symbolism too, as its fate grows intricately tied to Lizzy’s. I’m not sure how well it works. It’s a little heavy-handed. But the performances in Showing Up are fine throughout, with a nice big cast of able character players. What I liked best was a sense of the artist’s life that felt true. They work out of compulsion, for the love of it, and as a responsibility to their talent. But people take them as indulgent hedonists. Then the work becomes hard and life can grow overwhelming, when all they wanted was the satisfaction of finishing a project and doing it well. Lizzy has to have good days. We just don’t see many of them. She is pushed to her limits preparing for the show. A lot of people in Showing Up are artists or free spirits and have built their lives around their own creativity, and they struggle with the fact that there is not more joy in it. Showing Up may be a little on the dreary side, but it hits a side of the creative life that most people prefer to ignore. It looks like fun, but it’s hard.