“I’m enjoying my retirement. I get up. I do a little of this. I do a little of that and then it’s time to watch TV again,” says a character played by Judd Hirsch in Kelly Reichardt’s new movie “Showing Up.” And if that sounds exciting, then this is the movie for you. Like all of Ms. Reichardt’s movies, “Showing Up” is understated and slow moving, but holds itself with a strong sense of self-assuredness.
That assuredness borders on the farcical here given the almost entire lack of conflict and/or plot. Our main character, Lizzy, played by Michelle Williams, is a sculptor that has a show opening in a week. It doesn’t appear like it will be that big of a deal. She lives and works in an artistic community and seemingly everyone has some type of show opening at some point. One character named Eric, (inexplicably but capably played by Andre 3000 of Outkast fame) is the sort of person that finds a way to love something about anything. As an example, he mans the kiln at the school and when he burns one of Lizzy’s sculptures, declares that he thinks the burn makes it look even better.
Much of the movie is spent concerning itself with Lizzy’s efforts to get her family to show up at her show and/or bother her landlord Jo (another artist played by Hong Chau) to fix her apartment’s hot water boiler. About twenty minutes into the movie, there was what I thought was a throw away scene when Lizzy finds a pigeon has broken into her house and hurt its wing. This pigeon and Lizzy’s attempts to care for it provide the majority of the drama for the rest of the movie. The remainder of the drama occurs when her family members actually do show up at her show and it becomes readily apparent why the parents are divorced and her brother (played by John Magaro) probably shouldn’t be in public at all. But then the scene deescalates without a big fuss and the movie ends shortly thereafter. It all turns out okay and everyone goes on with their lives.
Did I like this movie? Well, let me just say that it is not on the level of “First Cow.” The sculptures, and other art created in the movie certainly could have been better. Will I see Kelly Reichardt’t next movie? Yeah, I expect I’ll be showing up.
I enjoyed being excited about “First Cow” this year, the
newest filmmaker from Kelly Reichardt. It is a story about the first cow in Oregon
in the 1920s and a odd couple of men, a cook named Cookie, played by John Magaro,
and a Chinaman named King-Lu, played by Orion Lee, who conspire to steal its
milk and use to it to sell pastries. As there are no other cows, they will have
the best tasting pastries in the territory. A boon!
What a dumb idea for a movie and I enjoyed telling people I
was anticipating “First Cow” because the plot seemed so enjoyably stupid. But
that was only half of it. I enjoyed getting excited by “First Cow” because Kelly
Reichardt had directed it and written it with her long-time collaborator Jonathan
Raymond. There previous collaborations include: “Old Joy”, “Wendy and Lucy”, “Meek’s
Cutoff”, and “Night Moves”. So even though it looked and sounded stupid, I knew
it was going to be good. And “First Cow” is very good. One of Reichardt’s best.
And I would know because I have now seen every movie she has made, even her obscure
student film “River of Grass.”
When I last wrote a review for a movie of hers “Night Moves”
in June 2014, I spent half the time trying to explain why I to liked Reichardt’s
style. I will add to that here by saying that she is from a very specific place
that filmmakers usually do not make films about. The location is Oregon. In
addition, she sometimes makes films that are period pieces. And where else can you
see a movie that takes place in Oregon in the 1820s.
That is when “First Cow” takes place, mainly in a trading
village comprised of Native Americans, English trappers, but also the
travelling Russians and Chinese. The only real house around belongs to the
richest man in town, played by Toby Jones. He also brought with him to the
territory the title cow.
Cookie is an unappreciated cook by his rougher compatriots.
He saves the life of King-Lu one day in the woods when he hides him from
vengeful Russians. They strike a tender and gentle friendship that is really
nice to witness. John Magaro’s performance is especially nice. When King-Lu
first invites him into his shack and asks him to take it easy before dinner,
Cookie’s first instinct is to start sweeping the floor. Then he goes outside
and picks flowers for the table. (I think this movie would make a hilarious
double feature with “The Revenant”. They exist in the same time period (1820s)
and general location (American West) but could not be more different in content
and tone.)
King-Lu is ambitious. His last scheme left him flat broke,
but he has not given up. King-Lu is excited by the possibilities of being the
first people in a new territory. “History isn’t here yet. It’s coming, but maybe
this time, we can take it on our own terms.” But how to start? Perhaps a crime,
surmises King-Lu anticipating Balzac’s famous saying.
The crime is to sneak into the field of the rich man and surreptitiously
milk his cow. Through this little tale, Reichardt seems to make lots of statements
about history, capitalism, opportunity, and class, but true to form, she does
not come close to hitting you over the head with it. One can simply watch “First
Cow” in a state of zen, letting the music gently wash over you, and taking
comfort in calm acting and simple storytelling. In jazz, they say it is the
notes you don’t play that make all the difference. The same can be said about a
Reichardt film.
I would have a hard time explaining why I go to Kelly Reichartdt movies.
There is a reason you can only see them in New York City (a few select others)
and then maybe only in one theater. They are tiny movies. The pace is slow. The
plot bare-boned. The direction is simplistic. This may remind you of other low
budget auteurs. Perhaps the dudes in the French Wave, or Ingrid Bergman, or an
early David Lynch film. But I hate those other guys. Why did I pay a ticket to
see Kelly Reichardt?
I think it might be because Kelly Reichardt lacks pretension. There is
very little that is abstract about her movies. Her movies are small not because
they are metaphors about larger things. They are small because the subjects are
small and Kelly is interested in small things and that’s it. Her best movie, Wendy and Lucy, is about a woman and a
dog that takes place over a couple of days as her car breaks down and she tries
to get it fixed. The remarkable thing about it is the combination of how
specific it is about its subject combined with how little it seems the movie
wants you to feel a specific emotion toward the subject. Kelly Reichardt seems
to be a competent enough director to make bigger movies that have more to say
but her scope stays restrained and her purpose ambiguous to the point where her
art achieves a sort of rarefied quality to it. These are serious dramas,
sometimes about life and death issues, but they are handled in the complete
opposite of a heavy-handed manner. I always feel especially comfortable watching a Kelly
Reichardt film.
“Night Moves,” concerns the simple plans of three environmental
terrorists in Oregon, played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter
Sarsgaard. Jesse and Dakota live on separate organic farms. Peter is a contact
Jesse has that used to be a marine and lives in the woods. He can make a bomb
that will blow up a little dam. It won’t really matter because there are 10
other dams on the river but it seems to them that something must be done and
blowing up this little dam may just get people talking about I don’t know
taking down the others. The movie concerns itself the most with Jesse Eisenberg
who probably at the beginning thinks he is in charge of this operation. But
little by little his idea of being in charge becomes more and more marginalized
to the point he seems to be acting randomly by the end. And maybe the point is
that this would be world changer was just acting randomly the entire time,
lashing out more in chaotic frustration as opposed to purposeful planning. I
don’t know. Kelly refuses to lecture me. I won’t give away what exactly happens
other than to say that true to form Kelly has the bomb explode offscreen midway
through and throws a rather unexpected wrench into the ending.
Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is at once granularly specific and mostly
opaque. It’s not that he doesn’t have feelings and thoughts. He just has nobody
to speak about them with. More ambiguous is the characters of Dakota Fanning
and Peter Sarsgaard. Their most dramatic moments are kept offscreen for the
benefit of profoundly confusing Jesse’s idea of what was his life’s narrative. At
one point he stands in the woods staring at his trembling hands. Boy, wouldn’t
you like to know what he is thinking.
What was it all about? Is this really how these terrible things happen?
Director Kelly Reichardt and star Michelle Williams, the team from “Wendy and Lucy,” are collaborating for the second time on the near perfect movie about a lost wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1845 named “Meek’s Cutoff.” The star rating I gave and the words “near perfect” may confuse you. Let me explain. Star ratings aren’t really helpful in that it rates a movie good or not relative to all movies and not other in kind movies of a particular genre. For instance I gave “Sucker Punch,” a flawed movie, four stars mainly for its ambition. It tried for about 100 things and got fifty of them right. “Meek’s Cutoff,” a near perfect movie, gets three stars because it is small. It tried about 10 things and got nine of them right before ending on an ambiguous anti-climax that I didn’t really care for. Does that mean people should like “Sucker Punch” more than “Meek’s Cutoff” generally. No of course not. I just like a bigger movie, that’s all. What I’m trying to say I guess is that the reader is better off reading the review before deciding whether they want to see the movie or not. The mark of a superior reviewer is one that describes a movie well enough that someone interested in that type of movie will have their interest piqued whether or not the reviewer liked it himself (and vice versa).
In describing Reichardt’s work one has to take out some pretty arty words. Words like “contemplative,” “aesthetic,” “serene,” “minimalist,” etc. Reichardt likes setting her places in Oregon. She likes lingering in long shots. She focuses in on minute details and treats conversations like she would the cinematography. Most of them are not entirely important and fit nicely into the background. I would be surprised if the budget for this movie went into seven figures. In a way, Reichardt works like the wagon train. She’s out there in the wilderness with very little crew or way of direction, trying out something original that almost nobody will see. Still the movie is very well made. The score gives the movie an unsettling tone. The acting is exceedingly natural. Over time, as the water runs out and tensions rise, suspense builds. The climax of the movie should be completely unexciting by any normal movie standard as it involves a situation that is often only the start of much larger action sequences. But here it still works because there is such a sense of reality that people pointing guns at each other feels very serious. It also helps that one is a woman who does so reluctantly. “Meek’s Cutoff” isn’t some sort of revisionist history. The Michelle Williams character, like the other women in the three wagon train, is of her time and place. She acts subordinate to her husband and men in general. But she also doesn’t want to die. And after wandering the desert being led by a braggart named Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood) who hasn’t the slightest idea of where he is going nor the slightest inclination to admit it, she becomes less and less enthusiastic about standing around waiting for the water to run out. Little by little she oversteps her bounds in the politest way possible until finally there is no more room for being polite.
Bringing along paranoia and emotional wailing is another couple on the wagon train played by Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Every time I see Dano he is hanging out in an unforgiving desert (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will be Blood.) You would think at some point he would get a tan. Anyway he has been perfectly cast. Mr. Paleface does not belong here. He should not have come. Providing the movie with the necessary amount of historical racism is Shirley Henderson. She has a nice way of going about it, like for instance fearfully remarking that Indians are murderous non-beings and then subsequently backing up the statement with the words, “It’s a well documented fact.” On some level every truthful historical movie is going to have characters that are flawed in such a way. Almost everybody back then was what we would call racist and sexist today. Future generations will probably say similar things about us I’m sure, though for what I have no idea.
One of my favorite books, “The Education of Henry Adams” had the following quote in it that caught my eye:
“The study of history is useful to the historian in teaching him of his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself.” (1905)
Growing up in school you have this notion that all of world history is accessible simply by opening a book, but this isn’t the case. History is limited by memory and preserved only by the efforts of real people who take the time to write it down. It is a profound truth that the people who did write things down were mainly concerned with men and were almost never women. According to what I’ve rated on Netflix, I have seen 1,511 movies. I can count on one hand how many of these were stories about historical women told by a woman (In this, I am subscribing to the auteur theory of filmmaking by crediting the role of author to not the writer but the director of a movie. In either case, still one hand) Specifically, I have only seen two movies. One was Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and now this one. This isn’t simply me being not very broad in movie choices nor is it completely the fault of the Hollywood boy’s club (though admittedly they do a downright awful job of marketing their products to half the movie going public.) It represents a literal gap in our knowledge of the world. These stories are lost to history. “Meek’s Cutoff” is based on a true story. There was a guide on the Oregon Trail named Stephen Meek who led a wagon trail in 1845 off into an uninhabitable no-man’s land. He didn’t know where he was going. The train ran out of water. People died and the settlers mutinied. But there were thousands of wagons not just three. And the Michelle Williams character? She’s completely fictional. Certainly there were women there. Yes, they did all the work we see them do in this movie. But if they had any personalities at all, we have no way of knowing what they consisted of. Nobody bothered to record it.
