Lizzy Carr (Michelle Williams), the central character in Kelly Reichardt's "Showing Up," is a sculptor finishing a series of ceramic figures for a gallery show. We see her working, throughout the film, on the small clay statues: all women, each about a foot tall, some mounted on rods, all with an intentionally rough and uneven surface that can appear awkward and unpolished. if you are close to her, but when you step back a bit you see the aesthetic elegance of her style. (Giacometti would understand.) He's making sculptures of female characters that look a bit ghostly from their lack of perfect line, but that's part of his design (they all look a bit haunted), and that quality is balanced by the delicate surprise colors. that they are painted with, that express their inner life. There is no doubt: Lizzy has talent. and devotion. With a kind of meticulous calm, she dedicates herself to creating and perfecting these objects.
What she doesn't have is a career as an artist. She will get her own show because she is finishing her studies at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, the city where she is from. She is a serious artist, as are many of her peers. The school is full of people doing fresh and quirky imaginative work, and it makes them feel separate from the hoi polloi; it is a community of creative souls. However, the broader art world they have their eye on is so competitive and demanding that the chances of any of them succeeding in it are, in fact, quite small.
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Writers: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt
Stars: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, André 3000
There's no shame, of course, in being a creative person who doesn't make a living out of it. That's been a part of the story of middle-class American life since the 1960s: the harnessing of the passionate artistic energies of ordinary people—artists, poets, actors—even if they aren't brilliant or ambitious or they are just lucky to do it. To the extent that we, the public, can judge what Lizzy does (her sculptures of her are actually the work of Portland artist Cynthia Lahti), we look at it and think, Yeah, she's good enough. But there is something poignant, and perhaps a special dilemma, about it. Art, as far as we can tell, is pretty much all Lizzy cares about. So what's the point of her life if she doesn't manage to become an artist, and for all her talent, her sculpting turns out to be…a hobby?
Part of the gentle charm of "Showing Up" is that the movie never articulates that question, at least not in the way I just did. Rather, it is a film of feints, ramblings, sideways humor, and the randomness of life interfering with life's purpose. I would say, however, that the question floats in the background, as Lizzy seems to cling to art like a survival raft. You could just call her a student, and you'd be right, but what she really is is a bohemian. She rents a red cedar-shingled apartment, with a garage studio downstairs, from Jo (Hong Chau), a landlord who is also her art colleague and friend of sorts, but the hot water hasn't worked for days and Jo hasn't bothered to fix the heater; she's too busy putting together her own gallery exhibit (of an installation that looks like Alexander Calder working with yarn).
It's not fun living without hot water (Lizzy hasn't showered in days), but more than that it's humiliating. It's a sign of her desperate plight. Lizzy, who appears to be in her 30s, lives hand to mouth, working in the office of the university's sculpture magazine, run by her mother, Jean (Maryann Plunkett), who is free-spirited but irritable enough that you interview the former hippie in it. Lizzy's father, Bill (Judd Hirsch), is also a sculptor, a potter who found enough success to rub shoulders with the art world. So while he and Lizzy have that in common, she's working in his shadow. Her parents, long divorced, care about themselves. And so, in her passive, shy, depressed way, is Lizzy.
“Showing Up” takes place over the course of a week, and to say that not much happens in it would be both true, totally inaccurate, and a description of the bizarrely fascinating micro-slice-of-life beauty of the film. Not much happens beyond Lizzy's daily tribulations, unless you count the things that happen as expressions of life's drama. Michelle Williams plays Lizzy with a wavy mop of brown hair, with a slight frown on her face, so all of her demeanor seems restrained and a little unkempt.
Watch Showing Up 2022 Movie Trailer
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