'Showing Up' spotlights artists dreams

Artists outside of Portland can identify to film

Kirk Boxleitner | Jun 01, 20230

Courtesy photo count

Michelle Williams labors in solitude in Kelly Reichardt's "Showing Up."

After her unexpected but characteristically meditative revisionist Western "First Cow" in 2019, Oregon filmmaker Kelly Reichardt returned yet again to her stomping grounds with "Showing Up" in 2022, which I finally had a chance to catch in the Rose Theatre's Starlight Room in Port Townsend.

This film could have been subtitled "The Portland Scene," because not only does it capture the subculture of working-class artists and the murmuring, occasionally circular conversations that define their freeform art classes and modestly attended exhibitions, but its art school scenes were shot at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which closed in 2019.

Michelle Williams began appearing in independent films nearly a decade prior to her turn in "Brokeback Mountain" in 2005, and began appearing in Reichardt's films with "Wendy and Lucy" in 2008, but even by those standards, she's almost unrecognizably deglamorized as the isolated, put-upon sculptor Lizzy, whose misfortune is being one of the few functionally responsible adults within her social orbit.

Any sufficiently hip subculture can safely be presumed to possess its own "scene," and a frequently voiced complaint among the members of any given subculture is that "not enough people are supporting the scene," which Lizzy's life of quest desperation illustrates, since everyone from her parents and her brother to her landlord are all so busy being artistic that the actual practicalities of their day-to-day affairs tend to fall on Lizzy's already slumped shoulders.

Lizzy's landlord Jo (Hong Chau) is able to create more ambitious art pieces than Lizzy's, and gets them displayed in larger venues that draw more visitors than Lizzy's shoebox gallery showings, in no small part because Jo not only neglects her duties as a landlord, leaving Lizzy without hot water for weeks, but also sticks Lizzy with nursing a wounded pigeon back to health.

Lizzy also has to worry about her brother Sean (John Magaro, who played "Cookie" in "First Cow"), whose alleged art projects include digging deep pits in his backyard, in the questionably mentally stable manner of Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Meanwhile, her father Bill (Judd Hirsch, effortlessly effective as always) has retreated into a retiree version of arrested post-adolescence, inviting near-strangers like fellow seniors Lee (Matt Molloy) and Dorothy (Amanda Plummer) to crash on his couch, in a sad affectation of neo-Bohemianism.

Lizzy's mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett) is more reasonably grounded in the real world, given her designated grownup role at the art school, but any concern she might spare for Lizzy seems to have been drained dry already by the need to check in infrequently on her randomly wandering son, and to counter the self-aggrandizing schmoozing of her immature ex-husband.

It's a credit to an actor as charming as Hirsch that he can wring the cringe-worthiness out of Lizzy's father bragging about an art aficionado's polite offer to come see his pottery, because he believes it's a prelude to them hooking up, even though she's young enough to be his daughter.

At the same time, as much as Reichardt gives us reasons to sympathize with Lizzy's plight, she also supplies clues that Lizzy is only marginally more self-sufficient than those in her orbit who indulge in far larger liberties. She works for her mom at the art school, which means Jean probably got Lizzy her job, and as slack of a landlady as Jo is, one senses she's not entirely wrong when she argues that Lizzy isn't paying enough rent to complain as bitterly as she does.

One could even argue that Lizzy wouldn't know what to do with herself without unnecessary burdens to pull her away from her work as an artist, since the pigeon is injured by the cat whom she doesn't even seem to enjoy owning, and when the pigeon has healed enough to fly away, Lizzy and Jo's first impulse is to search for it in the tree branches of suburban Portland, which are interspersed with enough power lines to resemble a Japanese anime background shot.

As authentic of a cultural snapshot as "Showing Up" is, I can't help but feel like its impressive cast ironically represents its biggest missed opportunity.

Matt Malloy's first major standout performance in indie films was arguably Neil LaBute's "In the Company of Men" in 1997, but he's been terrific throughout his career, including as a hilariously creepy teen beauty pageant judge in 1999's "Drop Dead Gorgeous." It's a shame that he was a virtually wordless tourist here, alongside Amanda Plummer, who just spent the last season of "Picard" tearing up scenery with as much relish as her late father, Christopher Plummer, did in "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."

It's still fun to spot André Benjamin, the musician known as André 3000, in the margins as one of the milling art scenesters, chatting idly with indie film veterans like James Le Gros, whom the makers of 2019's "Phoenix, Oregon" credited with acting as a beacon to attract high-profile talent to onscreen projects that might otherwise be overlooked.

"Showing Up" ends without resolution because it contains no dramatic arc that needs to be resolved, but it offers an interesting glimpse into a community, and a lifestyle, that any number of artists outside of Portland can likely identify with.