Showing Up

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Running time: 1hr48 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Michelle Williams in Showing Up

A sly and supple and semi-sweet new miniature from Kelly Reichardt, Showing Up spends much time on a metaphor that not only shouldn’t make for a good film, but has already made for many a bad one: a wounded bird, its broken wing bandaged and mending, waiting to fly and thrive again. There’s no way to describe it that doesn’t sounds grievously corny and on the nose; see last year’s abysmal Melissa McCarthy vehicle The Starling (but really, don’t) for an avian-human healing exercise that lives down to that promise. In Showing Up, however, introverted sculptor Lizzie (Michelle Williams) strenuously resists comforting sentimentality or whimsy, even when caring for an injured pigeon mostly out of a sense of dry, gnawing guilt. (It was her cat that did the damage, after all; Lizzie’s original, none-too-nurturing impulse was to chuck the feathered victim out the window.) Reichardt hands her wary heroine the metaphor as a kind of test, to see if she’s soft enough, selfless enough, uncool enough even, to acknowledge it.

Turns out she is, and the same goes for the film — a shaggier, more overtly comic exercise than we’ve previously seen from the director of such concentrated, heartsore works as Wendy and Lucy, Certain Women and previous Film of the Week favourite First Cow, but one still shot through with her grounded, perceptive humanity. I don’t just mean “humanity” as a vague, flannelly term to denote a small, sensitive film about people as opposed to superheroes; Reichardt’s cinema is characterised by a specific running interest in the ways we care for each other, both out of love and obligation, and the transactions we make to feel supported in life. That’s all present in Showing Up too, just in its drollest form, as Lizzie — a prickly, solitary, slightly lonely child of the Portland art scene — stumbles through life waiting for people to show up for her, whether by patronising the gallery exhibition she’s been preparing for months, fixing the hot water that’s been out in her apartment for weeks, or simply asking how she is once in a while. Perhaps looking after a wretched bird will karmically bring all that to her, but also perhaps not: sometimes a pigeon is just a pigeon, you know.

The stakes might sound low, but that’s Reichardt’s way: her films tend to be about the small moments and gestures that pave the way for greater revelations. And every one of those in Showing Up feels truthful, wry, identifiable even if you aren’t a hemp-wearing Portland hippie — a population that has long been an easy satirical target, but treated here as both innately funny and possessed of their own kind of integrity. Williams has previously done some of her best work with Reichardt, and the pattern continues with her witty, fine-grained, closed-up but plainly vulnerable performance here. Her Lizzie is depressive and stifled but also just briskly inclined to get on with things; she needs a moment of pause, of kindness to herself, and Reichardt’s lovely, generous film brings her to one, whatever tired metaphors it takes to convince her.

SHOWING UP (2022) Written by Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt | Shot by Christopher Blauvelt | Edited by Kelly Reichardt

Selected for the Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival