In case you were also wondering, no, current Portland resident Kelly Reichardt has not seen the Dream of the Nineties sketch from the pilot of Portlandia. But that’s fine, she doesn’t have to – she lived it.
The adamantly uncompromising film-maker behind First Cow and Certain Women got her start when independence was still a viable way of life for a generation of artists, young people who aspired to the modest goal of a minimally demeaning job to keep the bills paid and the space to make their thing their way. The media branded this demographic “slackers”, but their seeming lack of ambition belied a strongly held set of principles about the freedom to work unencumbered by commercial imperatives. Reichardt was there, she still recognizes the preciousness of this low-stakes creative latitude, and these days, she’s understandably uneasy about how difficult attaining it can be.
“Portland has become a really expensive city to live in,” Reichardt tells the Guardian over Zoom from Los Angeles. “When I started going there, I went because I was getting out of New York and looking for somewhere more affordable. When I was my students’ age, figuring out how to pay the rent was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t the only thing. There was time to hang out, and hanging out is essential to making art.”
Her wry, quiet, nonetheless enormously affecting new film Showing Up, which premiered at Cannes in 2022, takes viewers inside one of Portland’s last pockets still nurturing this nourishing come-as-you-are atmosphere, and follows a woman struggling to secure her place in it. The campus of the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which plays itself in this affectionate and gentle satire of starving artistry, terraforms a major American city into the sort of sleepy college town whose eccentric residents all seem a touch stoned even when they’re not. Here, sculptor Lizzy (Michelle Williams, whose flinty stare has brought Reichardt back for a fourth collaboration) labors in obscurity, making ends meet with a desk job at her alma mater in the department overseen by her mother. She’s getting ready for the exhibition she hopes might lead to a fuller-time career, but even with her aspirations limited to making a humble living out of her passion, absurd little demands of the everyday conspire against her. She’s not tormented by genius; she’s merely annoyed by everything else.
“I think [Lizzy] is a very good artist,” Reichardt says. “But there are a lot of different factors to being an artist. For her, I think a big part of it is that she’s hard to help. She’s not always an easy personality. We always thought of her like a trapped badger, where she’s got a lot of fight in her, which maybe you need to accomplish some things, but can also make other things more difficult.”
With a stony expression of weariness that stops just short of resignation, Williams carries Lizzy through a series of mini-tribulations that start to bear down on her as they accumulate. She cares for her cat, Ricky, and the pigeon he mauls. She checks in on her brother (John Magaro), whose latest installation digging gigantic holes in his back yard may be a symptom of his recurring mental illness, and her father (Judd Hirsch), an out-to-lunch pottery legend hosting couch-surfers Lizzy fears will take advantage of his generosity. With the water heater at her home on the fritz and her landlord (a friend and colleague leaning on their relationship to excuse her negligence, played with maddening aloofness by a spacey Hong Chau) occupied with two upcoming shows, she has to sneak showers at work. And in perhaps the greatest indignity of all, she must spend her own wages on the cheese to be nibbled at her gallery night, then stop her brother from stuffing his face with it.
A few weeks out from her 59th birthday – “I’m old now,” she deadpans – Reichardt has earned the right to bypass most of the ancillary duties that get in the way of one’s process. “At this point, and it took me a long time to get here, but I’ve got a very good set-up,” she says. For 17 years, she’s taught one semester at Bard College in upstate New York, and “aside from Taco Tuesday nights and breakfast on Tuesday mornings with Jackie Goss, two of my favorite things”, the professor professes that she’s “not doing a lot” around the school. For one, she’d sooner die than take a look at her RateMyProfessor profile: “No. Please don’t tell me! Don’t tell me anything about it. I don’t want to even know it exists. Please. I don’t Google myself, I don’t look at that. I just don’t want to know.”
Albeit from a safe distance, however, Reichardt can relate to this aggravation of distraction. “Lizzy works in administration,” she explains. “I had many, many, many jobs that drain you more than feed you. When I made Old Joy [in 2005], I’d been teaching at NYU as an adjunct for a decade, and that was a soul-suck. I made Old Joy with this weird idea that maybe this could get me over to Bard, which I’d heard about because I’d sat on a jury with Ed Halter and Peggy Ahwesh. I was like, ‘I want to be around these people, and people like this. I need to be at Bard, where they hang out.’ Miraculously, that worked. I made Old Joy, and it really did get me the Bard job.”
Showing Up exists as a sort of salvage ethnography for a vibe, capturing the chilled-out yet intellectually energizing charge of the collegiate-adjacent enclave before it vanishes completely. In replicating this pressure-free Eden that encourages experimentation and inquiry, Reichardt fostered that same ethic on set, where creativity flowered off-camera.
André “3000” Benjamin appears in a small role as a well-liked ceramics staffer, and he received a kiln-training crash course of his own. Reichardt fondly recalls watching him take to it: “He was like, ‘Clay! I knew there was something else I needed to be doing.’” Benjamin provided the unofficial soundtrack for the workday, seldom seen without the wooden flute he’d walk around playing for anyone interested in listening during idle moments. Reichardt decided to weave this into the fabric of the film around Ethan Rose’s synthesized score, and a special credit acknowledges Benjamin’s woodwind prowess. “On the last day of the shoot, I asked if I could record him,” she says. “We went out into a field, and for like 45 minutes, he just stood and played his flute. It could’ve gone on forever, except there’s always an assistant director coming to tell you that your time’s up. It was a great way to wind up our time at that school, for everything to stop so we could all sit and listen to André play.”
Afternoons of transcendent tranquillity like this, uncommon during the standard pandemonium of film production, can only come when surrounded by people with motivations more meaningful than fame or money. Showing Up, much like a conversation with Reichardt, makes the troubling suggestion that these pure circumstances have grown impossibly elusive for many still seeking them. In actuality, they’re already gone; the crew took over the OCAC shortly after the school ceased operations in 2019, and Reichardt heard that the land will soon be occupied by a private middle school. She hopes the ceramics facilities will be put to good use, but worries about what will remain for those hoping to pursue the life of the mind. Though she works at an insistently small scale, she thinks in the macro. Frustrated hopefuls like Lizzy once formed the backbone of America’s homespun cultural heritage, and without them, we’re headed toward a barren status quo of corporate art bound to leave the next wave of pioneers spiritually starved.
“I’d been a big fan of the Black Mountain College for a long time,” Reichardt says, referring to another fertile academic institution shuttered due to prioritizing enrichment for its own sake over filling the coffers. “I was interested in that place and its history and – not that this concept started there – their idea that if you make the curriculum center around art, then critical thinking will be a necessity, and that that’s good for democracy. With the closures of art schools and the drop-off in humanities, you can see where that’s a direct loss for the country.”
Reichardt upholds genuine beliefs worth defending in a time bent on breaking them down, but she also remembers that the first rule of refusing to sell out is not taking yourself too seriously. Perhaps out of an impulse to reassure herself or everyone she knows will read her words, she qualifies her downbeat diagnosis with a dash of self-effacement. “Keep in mind, I don’t have my finger on any pulse,” she says. “I don’t know what I’m talking about, really.”
Showing Up is released in US cinemas on 7 April and in the UK at a later date
