Showing Up

Films about artists and the art life rarely grapple with the everyday business of what artists do – or, in their procrastination, don’t do. That’s why Kelly Reichardt’s SHOWING UP is such a revelation – and, as a wry departure in this writer-director’s career, such an outright pleasure.

Reichardt’s films have often been touched with humour, but here she has made an out-and-out comedy – although characteristically, a philosophical, laidback, melancholic one. It’s set in Portland, Oregon – an enduring bastion of US counterculture – where struggling sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is planning her own show. Committed though she is, she is easily distracted by life’s inconveniences: her troubled brother (John Magaro); her cranky father (Judd Hirsch) and his freeloading house guests (a delicious comic turn by Amanda Plummer and Matt Malloy); an egotistical, negligent landlady and fellow artist (Hong Chau); and a pigeon which enters Lizzy’s life at the worst possible moment. As taciturn, tight-wound Lizzy, Reichardt regular Williams shows a whole new deadpan comic side to her talent, as the director’s focus on the ordinary and the uneventful opens up a rich vein of comic nuance and even, at times, joyous farce. (Jonathan Romney)

Kelly Reichardt: RIVER OF GRASS (1994), ODE (1999, K), THEN A YEAR (2001, K), OLD JOY (2006), WENDY AND LUCY (2008), MEEK’S CUTOFF (2010), NIGHT MOVES (2013), CERTAIN WOMEN (2016), OWL (2019, K), FIRST COW (2019)