BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
REVIEW
MAKING ANYTHING OF VALUE—A work of art, a poem, a solid piece of furniture—demands a deep descent into the self, to the point that it’s easy to neglect the needs of others in your orbit. Stay in the zone too long and there’s a danger of forgetting how to have a simple conversation or make a phone call, of going a little feral. Going into that inner wilderness is great, as long as we can follow the trail of bread crumbs back to the world of human connection.
That’s just one of the ideas at play in Kelly Reichardt’s quietly extraordinary Showing Up, a movie so fine-grained that you’re almost not prepared for the subtle power of its ending—the story is brought to land, almost literally, with the beating of wings. Michelle Williams is Lizzy, a sculptor living in Portland, Ore., and getting ready to mount a small but, for her, important show. Before we even meet her, we see soft watercolor sketches of her ceramic works-in-progress, carefully molded figures of women of all ages who seem to be dancing, or weeping, or possibly both. These works are rounding the bend toward completion, and we watch as Lizzy scrutinizes them, tracing their now hardened contours, as if trying to reclaim with her fingers one last memory of the formerly soft clay. This, in movie form, is one idea of what it’s like to make and think about art; its meaning can seem to pass through our skin, a mysterious vibration.
But like all artists Lizzy is also, whether she wants to be or not, a person living in the world. She has a small studio and living space that she rents from her closest friend, Jo (the remarkable Hong Chau), also an artist, with a personality as breezy as Lizzy’s is thorny: though she too is preparing a local show—two, in fact—she’s happy to spend any spare time she’s got installing a tire swing in the backyard of her small apartment building, rather than addressing the more immediate problem presented by Lizzy’s broken hot-water heater. Lizzy watches, her brow a tiny thundercloud, as Jo twirls in her newly installed swing, living the idea of what we want an artist’s life to be. Everything about Lizzy is coiled tight: What about her hot water? What about her needs? She’s preparing a show too. She stands there, sullen but also perplexed, her arms dangling in her shapeless cotton clothes li
