In Showing Up, Williams plays Lizzie (endlessly endearing in crocs, bob cut, and sensible linens), a sculptor who is neither famous nor struggling, but somewhere in-between: an undefined lower-middle-class of artist that cinema tends to overlook. It stars Michelle Williams, an actress who has always been at home to the quiet rhythms of Reichardt’s filmmaking, appearing over the years as a down-on-her-luck drifter in Wendy and Lucy (2008), a settler on the wagon trail in Meek’s Cutoff (2011), and as a woman burdened by a belittling man in the director’s anthology Certain Women (2016). Showing Up is about art, how art is made, and the people who use their time to make it. Two years after First Cow, which we collectively named our favorite film of 2020, Kelly Reichardt returns with a work like a line drawing: neat, lean, evocative.
