SHOWING UP

Film Information

From the rising tensions of a make-or-break week of a Portland artist getting ready for a big show, filmmaker Kelly Reichardt carves a profound, gorgeously layered portrait of a woman that is as much about what makes up a life as it is about making art. Michelle Williams shimmers with complexity as Lizzy, who is trying to hold things together when they keep trying to fall apart. Her hot water heater is busted, her brother might be going off the rails, her divorced parents are exasperating in their own separate ways, she’s surrounded by free spirits at the arts college where she works… and all this lies just below the raw surface of the work that feeds her soul.

It is through Lizzy’s deeply relatable, often comical, everyday tribulations on her way to a longed-desired achievement that Showing Up becomes a quiet tour de force. Out of pressurized moments of absurdity and inspiration, out of crazy-making yet sustaining relationships, there emerges the beautiful, wondrously jagged shape of a person’s life.

The film is Reichardt’s most sweetly comedic, yet it swerves irony. Instead, the fun comes from the awkwardness of Lizzy being Lizzy, from the hippy throwbacks of the Portland art scene, and the contradictory dynamics of Lizzy’s many push-and-pull relationships. Over the course of one frantic week, Reichardt takes us into the fabric of how Lizzy makes it through harried days and night-time triumphs in her garage studio, where she goes through the process of making her art.