“Showing Up” review: Michelle Williams in Kelly Reichardt’s latest play Americana

Editor’s note: This review was originally published on May 27 after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film will premiere in a limited release on Friday.

Kelly Reichardt has been doing Minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly in Oregon, where she lives, and mostly via her favorite tinkering team: quiet square pegs that don’t quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing search, she found many collaborators, but none more attuned to her recessive form of naturalism than Michelle Williams.

Like a homeless woman trying to find her stolen dog wendy and lucia, as part of a westbound wagon train in the opposite west soft cut, and as a semi-married couple trying to build their dodgy “dream house”. Definitely WOMANn Williams lets her performances come to us almost imperceptibly, in the spirit of Reichardt. Each character’s drama, if you can call it that, lies beneath the surface.

In Reichardt’s latest to show yourselfA Cannes Film Festival entrant, Williams plays Lizzy, a middle-aged ceramic artist who earns her rent by working in an arts and crafts school office. Your daily life is a mess of awkwardly blurred boundaries. Her father is a potter, now retired, whose reputation precedes her; her mother manages the office where she works, which can complicate relations between employees; Her brother is a conspiracy theorist who expects her mother to admit that he is the genius in the family, but is more or less under her care. She keeps her housing costs down by renting an apartment in a duplex from another artist, Joelle, who lives next door and is also a landlord, colleague and apparent friend.

It’s another tricky combination, especially since Lizzy’s hot water supply is stretched to full capacity and Joelle clearly can’t fix it. “I told you, you can shower with me!” said the outgoing Joelle, but Lizzy would probably rather wash herself in a bowl for the rest of her life than roll a towel in Joelle’s bathroom. Of course she accepts it, because making art is her priority.

Within a week she has a remarkable exhibition – which could change her life – and a squadron of ceramic figurines to be glazed and fired. The job gives her time to do her real work while Joelle’s garage offers space. It’s easy to see a parallel with Reichardt’s own career, in which she made the small films that made her a major American filmmaker while earning a living teaching college students. It’s about showing up on all fronts.

It’s possible to see Williams crawling around her apartment in her socks and skimpy skirt, thinking she’s doing next to nothing, at least performance-wise. Almost barometrically, Reichardt’s figures register emotional shifts, like changes in air pressure. Lizzy is not a speaker. When someone else at the cultural center tries to lure her in at lunchtime, she doesn’t actually tell her to back off, but instead hugs the sandwich she’s eating as if to ward them off.

When she leaves Joelle a screaming letter about how angry she is at her constant lack of hot water, her anger feels staged; Joelle certainly doesn’t take it seriously. You can really feel her pent-up resentment in her continued insistence on taking a shower in unlikely places – like the gallery where her work is on display.

That and the pigeon thing, an ordinary bird that Joelle finds after being run over by Lizzy’s stray cat. Joelle puts the pigeon in a box and explains that she will nurse it back to health, then parks it with Lizzy, who is too embarrassed by her cat’s misbehavior to refuse. The pigeon goes everywhere with one of them; It lives in the studio, goes to galleries, to the vet – to the vet’s surprise – and back and forth between their apartments, a living monument to the jumble of roles, responsibilities and resentments in everyone’s lives, but especially in the lives of women trying to free up space for creative work.

There’s a lot of tedium to the whole thing, underscored by an insanely repetitive score. Where Meek’s track And First cowReichardt’s last films were Western genre counterparts with epic themes, gunfights and a car falling off a cliff, to show yourself is about endless little acts of perseverance. Very little happens.

Lizzy sets up her workplace by isolating herself from others, including us. She doesn’t want our company. Only at the end of the film, when her exhibition begins and she worries about not having too much cheese on the appetizer plate, can a chink in her armor appear. It’s not much, but it’s enough for fans of Reichardt’s internalized cinema.

Title: to show yourself
Studio: A24
Release date: 7 April 2023 (Premiere in Cannes on 27 May 2022)
Director: Kelly Reichhardt
Screenwriters: Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt
Form: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, Maryann Plunkett, John Magaro, André Benjamin, James Le Gros, Judd Hirsch
Judge: R
Time: 2 hours 7 minutes