Kelly Reichardt and Showing Up

Williams plays Lizzy, a Portland sculptor with one week to prepare a potentially crucial exhibition and a daunting set of obstacles. She holds down a day job as a clerk at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, where her mother (Maryann Plunkett) is her boss. Her father (Judd Hirsch), a formerly renowned potter, is hosting a couple of freeloaders, and her brother (John Magaro) is digging a massive hole in his backyard, either because he’s onto something big or because he’s once again teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown. Lizzy’s cat has mauled a pigeon, and she feels obligated to nurse the bird back to health. Meantime, she has no hot water because her friend, fellow artist, and landlord, Jo (Hong Chau), has two shows to get up and running herself, and she’s got no time, she says, to fix the heater.

Showing Up is “a process film in which the process—the many ways a closely confederated group of Oregon artists live and work together—is part mental, part material,” writes filmmaker Ricky D’Ambrose (The Cathedral) at the top of his interview with Reichardt for Reverse Shot. Lizzy’s “painstakingly shaped array of Giacomettian ceramics—all female forms, with lanky limbs that fold and splay in every direction—are obviously self-portraits,” writes Adam Nayman in Cinema Scope, “and the fine motor skills exercised in their creation exist in tender, ironic counterpoint to the slovenly little sprawl of their maker’s existence.”

The real-life maker of these figures is Cynthia Lahti, who worked closely with Williams, while Chou picked up Jo’s skills from Michelle Segre. For Matthew Eng at Reverse Shot, the “primary pleasure of Showing Up is that Reichardt treats all the chaos and consternation of Lizzy’s consequential week with a light touch that verges on wry amusement. The filmmaker has described this film as her first comedy and cited Elaine May’s A New Leaf (1971), Jonathan Demme’s Citizens Band (1977), and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends (1978) as inspirations to her and Raymond.”

Both Brody and Nayman suggest that Showing Up is the closest Reichardt has come to self-portraiture, but the director has adroitly skirted the issue in the many interviews she’s given since the film premiered in competition at Cannes nearly a year ago. Reichardt did attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before making her first film, River of Grass, in 1994. Set near her hometown, Miami, the road movie premiered at Sundance and scored three Independent Spirit Award nominations.

And then Reichardt ran into a wall. In Metrograph Journal, James Lattimer recalls asking her about the decade-long dry spell she went through before she was finally able to get Old Joy (2006) off the ground. “It wasn’t by accident that there were so few women and people of color making feature films and getting them into the world,” she told him. “It took effort to keep it that way. There were very definite gatekeepers.” For a time, she tells Laura Staab and Christopher Small in the Notebook, she “wanted to be an experimental filmmaker, because that is how women could make films.” The shorts she made during those years are rarely screened, and Reichardt seems just fine with that.

Lizzy may or may not be an on-screen manifestation of Reichardt’s frustrations, but Showing Up is very much a portrait of the sort of community she thrives on. The ideal, as she’s mentioned over and again, is Black Mountain College, the legendary hub of midcentury avant-garde creativity whose faculty and students included Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

“I was interested in that place and its history,” Reichardt tells Charles Bramesco in the Guardian, “and—not that this concept started there—their idea that if you make the curriculum center around art, then critical thinking will be a necessity, and that that’s good for democracy. With the closures of art schools and the drop-off in humanities, you can see where that’s a direct loss for the country.” The Oregon College of Art and Craft, too, was shut down in 2019 after 112 years. The pandemic delayed plans to turn it into a private middle school, allowing Reichardt and her cast and crew to take over the building and its kilns—fired up in the film by the amiable Eric (André Benjamin)—in the summer of 2021.

Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov finds that Showing Up “operates in a tonal register near Ann Beattie’s best short stories: observations of specific/privileged zones within white-collar/creative class circles, rendered with a mildly satirical judgmentalism justified by its accuracy and judiciousness (a great line: ‘We’ve got different theories on cultural production, or he just doesn’t like me’). But an operating assumption of the film’s engagement with this space is feeling that it’s essentially worthwhile.”