May 17 & 18

7 pm Nightly
Matinee Thur May 18 @ 1:30
Drama/Comedy ‧ 1h 48 m
Rated PG

A film that understands what a creative life really looks like, Showing Up is an ode to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art. The director Kelly Reichardt has made a candid, joyfully inventive drama with her frequent collaborator Michelle Williams, painting a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.

Showing Up is a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art. Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, the film is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is the protagonist Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.

As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. For her, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes Showing Up a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration.