Showing Up (2022, Kelly Reichardt) (Patreon)

67/100

Were Michelle Williams a newcomer to the screen, she'd be receiving the sort of awestruck buzz that greeted Daniel Day-Lewis in 1985, when we watched My Beautiful Laundrette's coarse street punk transform into A Room With a View's effete upper-class snob (or vice versa—I hadn't yet started a log then and can't remember which film I saw first). Every iota of breathless life-force energy that she brought to her role in The Fabelmans has been painstakingly suppressed, creating a character defined almost entirely by feelings of aggrievement, justified and otherwise. It's not quite the comic petulance of, say, Roger Greenberg (though Showing Up is often very funny in its low-key way); Williams manages to make Lizzy intensely irritating even when she's indisputably correct, as with her repeated complaints about Jo not having fixed her hot-water heater. Is "pill" a gender-freighted word? 'Cause if not, I'd call Lizzy a quintessential pill. Reichardt is perhaps a little more fascinated and/or amused by her than I am, and there were times when I wished the film were more of an ensemble piece, equally curious about not just Hong Chau's beautifully passive-aggressive Jo but also Andre Benjamin's kilnmaster and Heather Lawless' artist-in-residence and whoever the hell James Le Gros is barely visible playing here. It's really the lovingly detailed milieu and concomitant attention to process that grabbed me, much more than Lizzy's gratifyingly unemphatic but still surprisingly conventional slow thaw as she becomes emotionally invested, against her will, in caring for a pigeon that her cat injured. Or the offbeat intrigue involving her horndog father and mentally unbalanced brother. At its best, Showing Up lightly skewers artists' pretensions and petty "office" politics without succumbing to the broad knee-jerk cynicism that made Art School Confidential such a drag. In an odd way, this is sort of Night Moves minus the suspense elements that didn't work at all, focused squarely upon festering emotions poorly articulated. It's the first Reichardt film that I'd describe as solidly good, rather than excellent or disappointing—even Certain Women, which got a similar rating (63), is both in distinct sections. But of course I'll take a second look down the road.