From time to time, I drop by a local gallery located not so far from my workplace, and I usually observe those exhibited works with some curiosity and fascination. Many of them look rather simple on the surface, but I often cannot help but wonder how much efforts and skills were actually put into these artworks by their creators, and that thought slowly came to my mind as I was watching Kelly Reichardt’s latest film “Showing Up” yesterday. While simply following the daily life of one artist, the movie gradually lets us pay more attention to the small and big details on how she lives and works day by day, and it will leave some lingering impression on you after it eventually arrives at the end of another phase of her life and career.

At first, the movie establishes how things have been going for its artist heroine. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a sculptor who works as an assistant for her mother who is incidentally an administrator at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and she has been recently preparing for the upcoming exhibition for her latest artworks. Although she is relatively less prominent than her best friend/colleague/landlady Jo (Hong Chau), we come to gather that she has built up a fairly solid career of her own, and she is certainly willing to push herself more for more advancement in her career.

However, she often finds herself distracted by small and big things happening here and there around her. Although her current residence is pretty cozy with her cute cat, she cannot take a hot shower due to some heater problem, so she asks Jo to take care of this annoying problem as her landlady, but, to Lizzy’s frustration, Jo seems more occupied with preparing for her two upcoming exhibitions. As watching how Jo looks like doing much better than her as an artist, Lizzy cannot help but envy that, and this envy of hers only exacerbates her continuing annoyance with that hot water problem.

We also get to know how problematic Lizzy’s family life is at times. While her no-nonsense mother is mostly supportive, she is often unavailable as being busy with her college administration work. While her eccentric father, who is also an artist, always welcomes her at his residence, he allows himself to be exploited by a rather suspicious hippie couple who has willfully stayed in his residence, probably because he is too lonely to live alone by himself. In case of her brother, it is evident right from his first scene that he has been struggling with some serious mental problem, but it looks like no one in his family is paying any attention to his welfare except Lizzy.

And there is a little problem with one particular pigeon which comes into Lizzy’s residence at one night. This pigeon happens to be seriously injured due to Lizzy’s cat, and Lizzy soon finds herself taking care of this unfortunate pigeon for a while even though that is the last thing she wants to do right now. She keeps trying to work on her new artworks as before, but the pigeon turns out to need more care and attention than expected, and this certainly adds more annoyance to her daily life.

We would not be surprised if Lizzy came to a sort of breaking point at any moment, but the screenplay by Reichardt and her co-writer Jon Raymond thankfully does not resort to any shrill melodramatic tactic as its heroine steadily holds herself to her ongoing work. While Reichhardt’s usual cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt patiently observes the heroine’s steady work process, we get to learn more about her mundane but undeniably realistic artistic struggle, and you will see how art often depends a lot on patience and diligence than inspiration. As shown from one accidental moment involved with a kiln, things can go quite wrong despite lots of efforts, and it is a bit amusing to observe how Lizzy later comes to make the best of this unexpected setback of hers.

And the movie intentionally swerves a bit from its main narrative at times for showing a number of artistic work processes happening around Lizzy’s workplace. While observing some of those college students honing their artistic skill in one way or another, we come to sense that Lizzy was probably not so different from them when she was studying at the college in the past, and it goes without saying that they will experience a fair share of anxiety and frustration just like Lizzy once they take the first steps of their careers after the graduation.

The laid-back storytelling of the movie is anchored well by another solid performance from Michelle Williams, who has been one of Reichardt’s frequent collaborators since “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), Although she is much more prominent with no less than five Oscar nominations at present, Williams effortlessly slips into her plain human character nonetheless, and the same thing can be said about several other notable cast members including Hong Chau, John Magaro, Maryann Plunkett, André Benjamin, Amanda Plummer, James Le Gros, and Judd Hirsch, who recently appeared along with Williams in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” (2022).

In conclusion, “Showing Up” is another wonderful work from Reichhardt, who has seldom disappointed me since I fortunately encountered “Wendy and Lucy” 15 years ago. I was not very enthusiastic about “Certain Women” (2016) at first, but that movie has grown on me a lot during last several years, and I am actually planning to revisit it sooner or later. In case of “First Cow” (2019), I chose it as the best film of 2020 without any hesitation, and it will probably remain as one of my favorite films of the 2020s. Although “Showing Up” is a relatively lighter stuff compared to these two small but impressive masterworks, it is still worthwhile to watch for many reasons, and it is certainly one of the better films of this year you should check out as soon as possible.