A bittersweet love letter to underrated, unsung, under-confident artists working diligently away on the margins of popular taste, Kelly Reichardt’s latest low-voltage drama inevitably invites autobiographical interpretation. Reuniting the feted indie auteur with her recurring screen muse Michelle Williams for a fourth collaboration, Showing Up is vintage Reichardt in its modest scope and intimate focus. The sequel to her much-admired bovine period piece First Cow (2019), it plays in a lower key, with a potential audience appeal that sits squarely in the rarefied art-house realm.
But for all its navel-gazing smallness, Showing Up is a thing of gentle beauty, wry humour and slow-burn charm, with a soulful melancholy that lingers long after viewing, and a richly eccentric ensemble cast that unites Atlanta hip-hop superstar André “3000” Benjamin, cult movie veteran Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction), and 87-year-old stage and screen legend Judd Hirsch (Taxi, Independence Day). Returning to Cannes for the first time since Wendy and Lucy (2008), Reichardt will world premiere her latest minimalist still-life study in competition today as the festival draws to a close.
Williams straddles the line between full-blooded movie star and art-house actor these days, but she plays in an impressively muted, subtle register here as Lizzy, an aspiring sculptor on the fringes of a buzzy visual art scene in Portland, Oregon. Working part-time at an art college, where suave kiln master (Benjamin) is one of her teachers, Lizzy makes clay figures that are strikingly beautiful, but out of step with her hipper peers and their big splashy installations, performance art pieces, multi-media collages and more. Reichardt could have drawn a more judgmental distinction here between loud, fashionable, attention-grabbing art versus more sincere, humble, indie-level work, but Showing Up is a more nuanced film than that.
As she nervously prepares for an upcoming gallery show, Lizzy wrestles with numerous distractions. Her apartment has no hot water but her neighbour-landlord Jo (Hong Chau), is proving frustratingly slow to fix the problem. Jo also happens to be a more popular rising star of the art world, with high-profile gallery interest and a party lifestyle, amplifying the multi-layered tension between these longtime friends. Once again, Reichardt unpicks this personal and creative rivalry with even-handed delicacy, never making Jo an outright villain or Lizzy a pure victim.
Lizzy is also struggling to manage her mentally unwell brother Sean (John Magaro), who is given to apocalyptic rants and sudden disappearances. In addition, she has to navigate the prickly chemistry between her divorced parents (Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett), who have both promised to attend her show opening. Complicating matters further, Lizzy’s cat has just mauled a pigeon half to death, so she spends much of the movie nursing the sick bird back to life. This could be an unusually heavy-handed metaphor from Reichardt, but it also fits squarely with her long tradition of making animals key characters in her films.
Showing Up grew out of a shelved project, a biopic of early 20th century Canadian painter Emily Carr, whose creative career was eventually consumed by her day job as a landlord. But Reichardt and her regular co-writer Jon Raymond came to conclude that Carr was too well-known for a story about marginalised artists, retaining some of the themes from her life but updating it to a fictionalised contemporary context, adding some of their own dysfunctional family issues to the mix.
As ever with Reichardt films, the performances here all have an impressively grainy, compassionate, patiently rendered authenticity. The real artworks used in the film, mostly by Cynthia Lahti and Michelle Segre, lend extra truthful texture and visual dazzle to the narrative fabric. A luminously burbling electronic score, by Portland-based composer and sound artist Ethan Rose, gets an extra lift from Benjamin with a brief burst of “Mayan drone flute.” Why? Because what kind of fool would say no to André 3000 playing a drone flute? Very little happens in Showing Up, but it happens in lyrical, humane, quietly moving ways.
Director, editor: Kelly Reichardt
Screenwriters: Kelly Reichardt, Jonathan Raymond
Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Judd Hirsch, André Benjamin, Maryann Plunkett, John Magaro, Heather Lawless, Amanda Plummer
Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt
Producers: Neil Kopp, Vincent Savino, Anish Savjani
Music: Ethan Rose
Production company: Filmscience (US)
Word sales: A24
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
108 minutes
