‘Showing Up’: The drudgery and bliss of art making

BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN The Washington Post

It’s sometimes been said that making art is thinking made visible. In her latest film, “Showing Up,” Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

Set in the milieu of a small art school in Oregon, and filmed on the campus of Portland’s now-defunct Oregon College of Art and Craft, the film is certainly not the first to hold the creative process up to scrutiny: its agonies and ecstasies, false starts and alchemical transformation of abject failure into — well, more interesting failure. But it is one of the best, in a medium that consistently gets art dead wrong, too often forsaking patience for the moviemaking shorthand of showing the flash of genius as, say, Jackson Pollock discovering drip painting literally overnight, in one alcohol-and-insomnia-fueled burst of discovery.

Co-written with her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond, “Showing Up” centers on Lizzy, a tortured ceramic artist specializing in small, sketchily rendered figures of women in awkward poses, created for the film by Cynthia Lahti. (Also accompanied by Lahti’s figurative drawings, Lizzy’s sculptural works sneak up on you gradually, like the film itself. These “girls,” as Lizzy’s friends call them, appear crude and slapdash at first glance, but the longer you look — and Reichardt lets us look and look and look — the more exquisitely expressive their eccentric gestures become.)

Is Lizzy, played by Reichardt’s other frequent collaborator Michelle Williams (“Certain Women,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “Wendy and Lucy”), always this dour? Maybe not. In her defense, the opening of her next show is a week away, and she’s stressed out by the fact that she has had no hot water in the apartment she rents from her neighbor, fellow artist and (sort of) friend Jo, for several days. Jo is played by the ever-wonderful Hong Chau, last seen in Darren Aronofsky’s polarizing “The Whale,” for which she was nominated for a supporting actress