Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is a film about careful thumb-strokes in damp clay. It’s about process, especially process as mundane repetition. What is practice, after all, but the decision to keep showing up?
The plot, such as it is, follows sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams) in the run-up to her show at a local gallery. It’s a somewhat harried time, with problems of various sizes and severities presenting themselves and, for the most part, not really resolving. Houseguests are mooching off her easygoing father (Judd Hirsch). Her brother (John Magaro) may be schizophrenic, and his hold on reality is getting looser by the day.
Her breezy, charismatic landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), is too wrapped up in her own art—and her own carefree life—to fix Lizzy’s hot water. She’ll do it when her show is done, she promises. Prickly and defensive, Lizzy points out that she has a show too; Jo’s not the only one. “Yeah, but I have two shows, which is, like, insane,” Jo says. Jo has also saddled Lizzy with caring for an injured pigeon, a distracting task that, as Lizzy reluctantly comes to care for it, becomes one of the movie’s emotional focal points.
By the end of Showing Up, the pigeon situation has resolved itself, but everything else—even Lizzy’s hot water—is still pending. That’s the right decision on Reichardt’s part. This movie needs to be all middle, a slice of artistic life about simply continuing the work.
Lizzy is also the right character for all this. It’s a carefully uncharismatic performance from Michelle Williams, with all her movie star presence stripped away: Lizzy is glum and cranky, slouching her way across the screen in what doesn’t feel like depression so much as a perpetual bad mood. It’s a telling detail that while we see a lot of characters at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (now defunct, alas) engage with each other’s art, showing mutual attention, Lizzy is mostly a compliment sponge, soaking up praise without returning it. (When she expresses a fondness for someone’s deserts right before the credit rolls, it feels like a window has finally opened to let in some fresh air.) It’s easy for me to feel what Lizzy is feeling—weary irritation and frustration, mostly—but it’s also exhausting, and sometimes I want to shake her. I know you’re only doing office work at the school, Lizzy, but look at these beautiful surroundings! Look at these fellow artists you could be talking to! Life has things to give you!
But even at her most Eeyore-ish, Lizzy is absorbing some sense of life and beauty, and she is giving it back—maybe in the only way she can. Her sculptures are like large clay dolls, women painted in fractured rainbows and caught mid-motion. Lizzy plods; her “girls” dance. She frowns; they despair. They capture emotions and extremes she doesn’t fully express any other way, and they work outside of the realm of her annoyance: one of her pieces is recognizably Jo, caught in a moment of exuberant play. It’s an excerpt of an actual movie scene, one where Jo was already grating on her, but there’s no trace of that in the clay.
Lizzy’s art is Lizzy at her best and most generous, and she gets it not through any ecstasies of inspired creation but through the ordinary accumulation of hours of work. She doesn’t have Jo’s electric energy. She’s not all that vivid or interesting on her own. She can’t market herself. No one would look at her and says she’s destined to make it big. (In fact, one of the movie’s rare missteps is the attention a more prominent visiting artist pays Lizzy even before she’s seen her work: it feels clumsy, like she’s simply responding to the fact that Lizzy is the protagonist. I like to think she sees Michelle Williams, undeniably a looker even when dressed in the frumpiest clothes imaginable, and thinks, “Eh, I could work with the personality problems.”) She just goes on, making her own distinctive pieces and caring enough to craft them as well as she can.
Discipline, persistence, and commitment have their own peculiar beauty. This is the art life as marriage, tending towards continuation rather than consummation. To drive the point home, Reichardt intersperses Lizzy and Jo’s scenes with other, more minor characters at OCAC also doing the work: weaving, dancing, painting a nude (who’s just getting back from a run to the bathroom), working out fiber arts compromises of Velcro over zippers. They’re all doing what they want to do, working individually but as part of a community. Maybe this film cheers me up so much because it reminds me a little of what we do here.
Showing Up is streaming on Max.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Luckiest Man in America (2024)
Technically 2024 because it premiered at Toronto last year. Dates are weird. Anyway, I loved this. It manages to balance tension, drama, and comedy throughout the runtime. It develops the crew’s characters and motivations for working against Michael and then trying to build him up. The irony that they embrace his success at the exact moment that he’s ready to quit is great. The acting is well done all around, and the script keeps things moving smoothly. Shout out to Shamier Anderson as the hatchet man who is clearly the most capable man in the room at any given moment but no one will give him the credit he deserves. In a more just world, this would be a late August release by Warner Brothers to get adults in theaters during the lead up to awards season. As it is, it’s going to be an underseen gem.
I may have to make a bit of a drive to see this, but I’m really tempted to catch it this weekend. The trailer was great. (And bonus Walton Goggins!)
Hacks, “There Will Be Blood” through “Trust the Process”
Einbinder does some of her best work yet in these episodes, from her dry humor in “Trust the Process” (“Interesting that’s not more widely known”) to her trapped, heartbroken reading of her email in “Quid Pro Quo.” She has the kind of expressive face that can easily become all eyes, and she uses it to her advantage in her emotional scenes to glorious effect.
Smart, on the other hand, does the reverse to equally glorious effect, with Deborah animated in her anger but freezing into protective stillness when she’s devastated. She’s also great at pettiness: her pointedly praising the other young female comedian in front of Ava, down to complimenting her dainty hands, is hilarious in its brazen obviousness. But Deborah doesn’t care if something is kitschy or not, and that includes kitschy revenge.
Such a great moment for their relationship that even when Deborah is freezing Ava out and making her life hell, she still agrees to turn the bus around (losing her much-needed win in Oklahoma City, albeit with the dark laugh-line of “Those people have seen enough bombings”) to go back and look for Ava’s ashes. And having revealed that the regard is still there underneath, she gives up on the worst of the frostiness, because now they both know it’s a lie.
Jimmy briefly getting a taste of a highly competent, devoted, starry-eyed assistant only to immediately get trapped with Kayla again, and all for nothing, and still with a year of anger management classes, is some incredibly cruel comedy. I kind of love it, but it’s also genuinely agonizing. Poor Jimmy!
The thing that makes Deborah funny and interesting is that she genuinely has no sense of irony, something definite reflective of her generation but even moreso by her personality. If she likes something, then she likes it, and anyone who disagrees is simply wrong. Ava has a much more strongly developed interest in other people, even if it’s mainly for her sense of moral superiority. Of course, both can deeply pragmatic about human behaviour when they want to be; Deborah for her career, Ava when she lightens the fuck up a bit.
That’s a great point about the irony, especially since I feel like art usually pairs a sense of irony with a sense of taste: Deborah has the second but not the first, and that shows up even in small scenes like her finding flattering gas station sunglasses. I also always love whenever she’s in favor of the kind of obvious pleasures Ava initially wants to dismiss, like punchlines.
Justified, Season One, Episode Five, “The Lord Of War and Thunder”
Making Raylan’s dad a criminal fuckup is a brilliant moment of creativity. On one level, it serves as a kind of explanation for Raylan, where defeating his criminals is really defeating his dad. Arlo has clearly gotten by his whole life through a mixture of charm and a tendency to stick around places where his violence is considered acceptable (Perkins works as the reverse, a weak man trying to function powerfully in a place he’s deeply uncomfortable), and Raylan clearly picked up his wit from the guy (“I sent my checks on the first of the month.” / “You send ‘em by carrier turtle?”) while respecting nothing else about him. Raylan has clearly spent his life trying to beat his dad by not being him. What’s great is that most of this is conveyed through plot and the way they carry themselves around each other.
This is an interesting thing to watch as I contemplate the idea of intelligence. I have come to think recently that it’s vastly overrated; I prefer to think of myself as a dramatic character, and dramatic characters by definition always get what they want, and it’s more about the wisdom to pick your target than the firey brilliance of executing a plan. At its worst, people treat intelligence as a trait of one’s own inherent superiority. If I am smart, everything I do is inherently successful; any failure is the world being wrong for some reason. I feel like my increasing indifference to it makes it easier to see what it is more clearly. Raylan is visibly street-smart, if nothing else, and he deals with stupid people as a matter of course. His goals are always extremely practical, and while he does have ‘clever’ plans occasionally (like pretending to be a homeless labourer), he’s mostly taking the direct route, which mostly consists of negotiation.
Meanwhile, most of the criminals are aiming to feel clever or tough before they want to achieve any practical goal; it isn’t just about making money, it’s about declaring how awesome one is. When you set out to show off how smart you are, you’ll usually succeed. Raylan is a positive (not to mention wish-fulfilling) alternative to that. More thoughts to come.
Biggest Laugh: Raylan’s boss manages to steal this early: “You’re like some drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp coz that’s where the light is!”
Top Ownage: The fight between Raylan and his fugitive was great, especially his ex-wife showing up with the gun. “If you don’t put that gun down, shots will be fired, and I cannot control the outcome. […] Any other end of this is sad or tragic.”
“The Lord of War and Thunder” also demonstrates ownage as an episode title, frankly.
Raylan–as a performance more than as a character–really does feel like the perfect synthesis between the other two great Timothy Olyphant roles, Seth Bullock and Joel Hammond. For some reason I feel like that works in favor of the wish fulfillment: dramatic enough for the wish, comedic enough for the fulfillment.
AHP (s5e4) “Dry Run” – Young mob soldier Robert Vaughn is trying to move up in the ranks of mob boss David White’s organization. In a test to see if he has the muster White sends him to the home of rival Walter Matthau to rub him out. Matthau proceeds in trying to convince Vaughn to switch sides and rub out White. Will Vaughn maintain his loyalty? Talky episode with only two locations – White’s office and Matthau’s wine cellar. But the pressure cooker performances of Vaughn and Matthau make it rise from potentially middling to above average. It’s interesting seeing these two actors in something before they pop a few years later into stars. It has a common EC comics twist if you know the clues. But any episode that opens with a mob boss cackling over his aquarium of piranha gets my attention. Hitchcock’s intro has him looking noirish in a fedora and raincoat talking about all the current detective shows with jazz scores (like Peter Gunn presumably). This seems to be his take on those.
But any episode that opens with a mob boss cackling over his aquarium of piranha gets my attention.
More stories should open that way.
Kojak, “Birthday Party” – A pair of thieves from Kojak’s old neighborhood kill a cop during a robbery. One is arrested, but he plots with his brother and his girlfriend to get himself exchanged for Kojak’s 10 year old niece, who just happens to be having an outdoor birthday party. The plot relies far too much on coincidence and contrivance – somehow this kid leaves her uncle better clues than most adults would – and on Kojak at once being in trouble for not stepping back and able to do as he wishes. But the acting and production values cover a lot of sins. Including filming in NYC. As much as they got better in making LA seem like New York, the concrete canyons and sunlight and landmarks can’t be replicated. Plus someone finally remembered that the main Greek neighborhood in NYC is in Astoria, and the birthday party was filmed at Astoria Park along the East River, with the Triboro Bridge in the background. And oh, nostalgia, as the wicked girlfriend gets into a Scull’s Angels taxi. This was a yellow cab company you could actually call to get a car, and the IL7-7777 phone number on the cab brings back memories of times my mom would do just that. A very young and thin Richard Gere makes an early appearance.
Frasier, “Chess Pains” – Frasier gets an antique chess set (which to his credit he doesn’t just have for display) and starting playing his dad, who keeps beating him. This drives Frasier nuts until he finally wins, and that in turn drives Martin nuts. Some good bits, but this is Frasier at his most self-involved. But the real high point is Niles getting a dog who is somehow the canine version of Maris. Which he naturally does not notice at all.
Year of the Month update!
This April, we’ll be looking at 1999, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
TBD: James Williams: 10 Things I Hate About You
TBD: Ruck Cohlchez – Summerteeth/The Soft Bulletin/Utopia Parkway
TBD: Lauren James – Storm of the Century
Apr. 11th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Balloon Farm
Apr. 15th: Ben Hohenstatt: The White Stripes
Apr. 16th: James Rodriguez: The Scooby Doo Project
Apr. 17th: Cameron Ward/Cori Domschot: The Mummy
Apr. 18th: Gillian Rose Nelson: The Hand Behind the Mouse
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: The Matrix
Apr. 25th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Disney on DVD
Apr. 29th: Dave Shutton: American Pie/Class of 1999
And the open call for May starts now! Our year will be 1962, so you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 2nd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Moon Pilot
May 9th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Bon Voyage!
May 15th: John Bruni: L’Eclisse/Il Sorpasso
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
I really like your observation: “one of her pieces is recognizably Jo, caught in a moment of exuberant play.” I think Showing Up is such an important film for how it documents the struggle to make art in the era of bigger and worse obstacles: Spotify, Covid, AI.
Thank you! And at least with the Spotify and the AI aspects, it’s especially interesting how this highlights how valuable physical engagement can be for art, both in terms of cultivating community–the classes, the gallery shows–and in terms of the actual craft.
I recently moved from a strong arts community to a frankly much weaker one, and while the former had its issues (a perpetually unfixed water heater functions as a literal and metaphorical challenge), I do miss the constant physical presence of art and artists, definitely serves functions of a strong community even beyond its value as art in and of itself.
It’s at least what I do best here. Showing up!