Inconvenience and Craft in Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’
No movie released in 2023 better illustrates the stakes of original work and artistic creation than Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’.
In a media landscape where conflicts are impossibly large, where heroic, larger-than-life protagonists must overcome the Big Bads of not only their world but a growing multi-verse of other worlds, it becomes apparent that when everything is at stake, then, actually, nothing matters. When n+1 asked, “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” in 2023 — skewering the hideousness of our increasingly grey surroundings — they did not ignore the “ugly sameness” at the movies. At the multiplex, we’re trapped in “the late green-screen era” of underlit films and remade remakes.
Amidst a year full of self-reflective auteur cinema, franchise film, and ensuing franchise fatigue, no movie released in 2023 better illustrates the stakes of original work and artistic creation than Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up. In place of gimmicks, nostalgia, and new technologies, Showing Up reminds us that nothing replaces craft. This is not to say that the film eschews the realities of working within an industry, one which exerts extreme financial and cultural pressures on art and which commodifies both art and artist for a wider audience — if anything, Showing Up produces a deeply unromantic view of creativity. Reichardt’s film is a 108-minute reflection on the artistic process, from its joys and labors to its tediousness and interruptions.
In her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor at the Oregon College of Art and Craft with an upcoming gallery show. Throughout the film, Lizzy seems to want nothing more than time and space to work. She asks for time off from her boss at the college (who is also her mother). She repeatedly seeks out comfort (or, rather, livable conditions) in the form of a working water heater from her landlord slash colleague slash more successful artistic rival Jo (Hong Chau), setting up a contentious dynamic that painfully and accurately captures the tensions of such a tangled relationship. The two are repeatedly forced to interact because of Jo’s insistence that Lizzy help nurse an injured pigeon found outside their houses, a task Jo takes on out of either resignation or guilt that it was her cat who maimed the pigeon the night before. In addition to her lack of hot water, Lizzy faces a number of other obstacles: her brother Sean (John Magaro), whose reclusiveness and paranoia reach a peak in a mental episode; her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett), who refuses to acknowledge the truth of Sean’s condition, defending him as simply too much of a creative genius; and her father Bill (Judd Hirsch), whose friends have taken up residence in his home with a bit too much comfort.
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