Cannes Review: Michelle Williams In Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Showing Up’
27.05.2022 - 18:49
/ deadline.com
Kelly Reichardt has been making minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly around the state of Oregon where she lives and mostly about her favored awkward squad: quiet square pegs who don’t quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing quest she has found many collaborators, but none more attuned to her recessive brand of naturalism than Michelle Williams.
As a homeless woman trying to find her stolen dog in Wendy and Lucy; as part of a wagon train heading west in the counter-western Meek’s Cutoff; and as half of a married couple trying to build their dubious “dream home” in Certain Women, Williams lets her performances ripple almost imperceptibly towards us, which is very much the Reichardt way. Each character’s drama, if you could call it that, lies under the surface.
In Reichardt’s latest, Showing Up, running in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Williams plays Lizzy, a middle-aged ceramic artist who makes rent by working in the office at an arts and crafts school. Her daily life is a tangle of uneasily blurred boundaries. Her father is a potter, now retired, whose reputation precedes her; her mother manages the office where she works, which can make staff relations prickly; her brother is a conspiracy theorist her mother expects her to concede is the genius in the family, but who is more or less under her care. She keeps her housing costs down by renting a flat in a duplex owned by another artist, Joelle, who lives next door and is both landlady, colleague and ostensible pal.
It’s another thorny combination, especially since Lizzy’s hot-water service has packed up and Joelle is signally failing to get it fixed. “I told you: you can shower at my place!” says extroverted Joelle, but Lizzy would
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