‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory (Published 2023) (2024)

The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.

The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”

It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.

Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.

When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.

As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.