“Go fall in love with Cynthia’s work,” Reichardt asked of Williams, and the actor followed orders. Her character’s sculptures in “Showing Up” were made by the Portland artist Cynthia Lahti. I will do anything Kelly tells me to do, is essentially what Williams, who has worked on four films with Reichardt, told me. Reichardt’s gaze saps stars-Laura Dern in “ Certain Women,” André Benjamin and Michelle Williams in “Showing Up”-of their typical screen glamour. Celebrity is anathema to Reichardt it was clear that the bio-pic had to be scrapped. A statue of Carr, elderly, accompanied by her dog, Billie, and her monkey, Woo. He and Reichardt travelled to Vancouver for a research trip, and they found monuments to Carr everywhere. But the writers were drawn, “perversely,” Raymond told me, to the fallow period in which Carr could not approach the canvas and instead ran a boarding house. Like Reichardt, Carr was impelled by the natural world, its enigmas. (Of A24, the independent studio that produced “Showing Up,” she remarked: “I like them, but they do squeeze in an extra photo shoot.”) Before she came up with the idea for the film, Reichardt and the novelist Jon Raymond, her frequent co-writer, intended to write a script about the Canadian painter Emily Carr. The director works cut off from anything that moves like Hollywood. Why should this normal life be classed as sacrifice, as pure? “I never assumed,” Reichardt said, “that I was not going to have a job.” She is a working artist, one who supplements filmmaking with teaching undergraduates. Only in recent years has she been financially able to tie herself to a mortgage. She is fifty-nine a good portion of her adulthood has been spread across sublets and rentals, in New York City and the Pacific Northwest.
She splits the editing work with an assistant. She may scour dozens of states for a filming location, grinding vehicles into highways and back roads. What can seem ambiguous or glamorous about the labor of a director surfaces, in her case, as explicit and arduous. It can often feel dazed because of the deep reserve of Reichardt’s stamina, which has carried her through her singular three-decade career.
The regard for her takes on a hero aspect. Reichardt is this country’s finest observer of ordinary grit, an American neorealist to place among the likes of Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Vittorio De Sica. “Showing Up” aerates the act of making art, staying close to the anima while keeping the demands of the cynical market at a distance-bringing the mystery of creation to the everyday. Then we are led to glimpse Lizzy in her studio-the garage of her apartment-shaving away at clay. They are sketches for Lizzy’s statues, little, odd women, possibly homunculi of the artist herself. The film opens with watercolors of a female figure, stretched in varying kinetic poses. But we do not first encounter Lizzy in a state of upset. And then there’s her day job, as a receptionist at her art-school alma mater, to pay her landlord, who dallies on fixing the heater. Lizzy’s water heater is broken therefore, she cannot bathe. Our sculptor, Lizzy (Michelle Williams), would like nothing more than to toil in her studio in knitted-brow concentration. Reichardt’s film is a rejoinder to this-though that’s not to suggest that “Showing Up” neglects the fact of angst. (Think of that indulgent monster, wrecked in the process of translating soul to capital.) The concept signals the movements of the mind more readily than the movements of the hand. “Because I was too nervous to show my friends my movie.” The screening was seamless if you were a member of the audience, a durational event if you were Kelly Reichardt. “I think I made everyone uptight,” Reichardt recalled.
Her film, a portrait of a sculptor beset by stress in the days leading up to an exhibition, was released into the world of the screening room sans her final stroke. She rushed back to the theatre, arriving with no window left to run a sound check. She was picking at fries when she realized that she had the time wrong. The director Kelly Reichardt was in a state of irritation at a screening of her eighth and latest feature film, “ Showing Up.” Certain she had come to the theatre early, Reichardt had decided to kill time at a chain burger spot nearby.
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