Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Showing Up’ on Paramount+, Another Intimate Character Study from Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt

Showing Up (now streaming on Paramount+, as well as VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) marks the fourth collaboration between filmmaker Kelly Reichardt and actor Michelle Williams, who I’d assert are officially the Scorsese and DiCaprio of softspoken observational dramas identifiable by their realism, natural lighting and subtle comedy. The film is preceded by Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women and Wendy and Lucy, the latter of the three being the standout, and one of Williams’ career highlights. Showing Up casts her as an artist whose work for an upcoming show is routinely interrupted by a cat, or a pigeon, or her job, or her concern for her brother, or her friend/fellow artist/co-worker/landlord. Life! 

SHOWING UP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jo (Hong Chau) rolls a tire along the sidewalk instead of repairing Lizzy’s (Williams) water heater. Then Jo hangs the tire in a tree and makes a swing instead of repairing Lizzy’s water heater. Jo follows that up by working on her two upcoming art shows instead of repairing Lizzy’s water heater. It’s been a couple weeks at this point and if Lizzy’s lucky the water comes out a bit lukewarm for a minute and she doesn’t hesitate to pester Jo about it. Can’t blame her for being annoyed by the inconvenience. Jo owns the apartment building and has a lot going on but, hey, responsibilities, right? Lizzy walks back into the house and is about to head down to her garage-studio space and work on her ceramics – the walls are lined with shelves full of materials, and prototype sketches and watercolors of her sculptures – when the cat meows. Unlike his owner, he’s an outgoing, vocal cat. And like pretty much every cat ever, he’s meowing because there’s no food in his dish. There’s none at all in the house, even. And unlike Jo, who continually kicks the water heater can down the road to deal with later, Lizzy sighs, grabs her purse and heads to the store for cat food. Responsibilities. “You’re ruining my workday,” she scolds the cat, although I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The cat’s name is Ricky. He seems sweet.

It turns out to be a productive outing to the store, since Lizzy finds some wood blocks abandoned on the curb. She’ll paint them and they’ll be pedestals for her “girls,” the sculptures she toils over, first molding them with clay and letting them dry then snapping an arm off at the elbow – “Sorry,” she says to one – so it can be glued on at a different angle and painting them and finishing them in the kiln. Lizzy’s paying-the-bills work consists of sitting at a desk administrating this and that for an arts college in Portland. Her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett) works there and Jo is in and out of the bustling facility (note, the name one of Jo’s installations is partially obscured by a shot but it definitely includes the words “astral hamster” in that order)  where students paint and sculpt and dance and loom and dye textiles and there’s always a floppy sheepdog lying directly in the doorway so everyone has to step over it. This is clearly the kind of place where people continually step over a dog instead of making it flop somewhere out of the way. The dog has its spot and that apparently is its spot. (We later learn this is Jean’s dog, since we see her at home stepping over it.) 

One night Lizzy is awakened by a noise in the bathroom. Ricky has snatched and mauled a pigeon. She shoos the cat away and scoops the pigeon into a dustpan and drops it out her window; “Go die somewhere else,” she says. The next morning she sees Jo holding the bird but doesn’t tell her what happened last night. It’s still alive so Jo wraps it and its broken wing in a bandage and nestles it in a cardboard box then hands it to Lizzy, all instead of fixing Lizzy’s water heater. Lizzy has to take care of it because Jo’s busy with everything but the water heater, and now the bird too, sometimes. Lizzy locks the cat out of the room and sculpts with the bird nearby, breathing strangely in its box. She takes it to the vet who suggests keeping it warm with a hot water bottle. But she has no water heater, she says, and the vet suggests warming some water on the stove, because she has one of those, right? 

Lizzy ends up bending over backwards for this bird her cat nearly killed. She relocates her sculpting materials to the kitchen so the bird won’t be cold in the studio. She takes the bird to work and sets it on the desk beside her and one of Lizzy’s coworkers laughs that she took a pigeon to the vet; he’s from Tacoma, where they’d shoot pigeons in the head with BB guns. There are other things for Lizzy to take care of – her retired father Bill (Judd Hirsch) for example, who hosts a couple of roaming hippies in his home, and she worries that they’re taking advantage of him. And her brother Sean (John Magaro) is increasingly reclusive, not answering messages, digging giant holes in his backyard for indeterminate reasons and sometimes hearing voices that others can’t hear. You may notice that no matter the time of day or where she goes, Lizzy always wears a droopy expression and droopy socks to match (maybe you won’t notice the socks, but I’ve mentioned it now, so you likely will). Lizzy’s gallery show is on Monday. She still has no hot water. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Old Joy was the first Reichardt film I saw; it surprised me with its patient storytelling and the director’s innate ability to balance warmth with astute observation. Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff raised the dramatic stakes; First Cow keenly leavened the drama with the comedy of two men sneaking through the night to steal milk from a rich man’s cow.  

Performance Worth Watching: Showing Up is Williams; Williams is Showing Up.  

Memorable Dialogue: Lizzy wonders why Sean is obsessively digging in his yard:

Lizzy: I didn’t know you were into earth work.

Sean: Art is the earth talking. Poetry is the voice of the earth. It’s all earth work.”

Sex and Skin: A male nude figure model in a drawing class.

Our Take: No hot water, but things are coming to a boil anyway. A very quiet boil. Showing Up is not a movie of raised voices or showy gestures, as is Reichardt’s M.O. Williams flares up only once, briefly and late in the film, when Lizzy leaves Jo an angry voicemail; it’s the foil to her Oscar-nominated performance in The Fablemans as Steven Spielberg’s de-facto on-screen mother, or the memory of her at least, which was a work of exaggeration, bold emotion and a generally broadly impressive largeness. Of course Reichardt would choose to squint in concentration at Lizzy’s work in long still shots until we wonder if her “girls” with their crudely rendered, possibly haunted faces and occasional missing limbs are dancing in expressions of joy or contorting in quiet agony – Reichardt is a filmmaker of great intuitive control and with an eye for exacting minutiae. Lizzy may be an analog for how Reichardt works, but of course, that’s just an assumption.

But if Reichardt has any chosen medium, it’s assumption, or more accurately, implication. She creates (captures?) a nook in the Portland arts community where there are no sharp corners or pristine window panes. It feels exquisitely insular. Everything’s worn around the edges and rounded off, and earth tones dominate save for the artworks themselves. It’s a bubble populated by people who create or implement others’ creations. Andre Benjamin plays the kiln operator who pulls Lizzy’s best, favorite sculpture out half-shorched, blackened on one side like a salmon filet, and as she furrows her brow over it with an expression that could be disappointment or puzzlement or intrigue, he praises the concept of imperfection, which defines existence in this movie. Lizzy’s other works are carefully considered in their roughness, their ragged fringes, but she doesn’t seem to have considered the idea of a happy accident.

The film is full of such moments, where something relatively small like this occurs, and we, via Reichardt’s camera, study her face in search of an emotional hook. It’s a fascinating process; Lizzy’s expression is frequently sullen, the hangdog look of someone who’s perhaps a little self-tortured, and definitely under stress. Take the scene where she pours over a sculpture in the dark of the wee hours and hears Jo come home with a friend and Williams’ face expresses a melange of faint, complex emotion. Is she annoyed? Lonely? Content to be alone? It’s a trademark Reichardtism that we’d get to know a character so intimately, and yet they remain a mystery.

Our Call: Reichardt’s minimalist visual style and deep interest in character, setting and atmosphere render Showing Up another one of her pensive gems. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.