107 min | R | April 7, 2023 | A24
Lizzy has a gallery show in days, a broken water heater, and a landlord too busy with her own art to fix it. Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams reunite for a portrait of making art in the cracks of an uncooperative life. No breakthrough arrives, and you just keep showing up.
Lizzy is a sculptor in Portland with a solo show opening in a few days. She also works an administrative job at the art college where her mother is her supervisor. Her landlord Jo is a fellow artist with two shows of her own about to open and no urgency about fixing Lizzy’s broken water heater. Kelly Reichardt builds the film around the unglamorous labor of making art while life refuses to cooperate. The subject is not inspiration. It is maintenance.
Michelle Williams plays Lizzy with her shoulders pulled up around her ears. She moves through every scene mildly aggrieved and mostly silent about it. Williams lets the resentment leak out in small gestures rather than speeches. Hong Chau plays Jo as the kind of artist who floats through life expecting it to accommodate her, and the contrast between the two women is the film’s engine. John Magaro plays Lizzy’s brother Sean as a man unraveling in his backyard while the family agrees to call it eccentricity. Judd Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett play the divorced parents Bill and Jean with the easy cruelty of people who have stopped pretending to treat their children equally.
Reichardt directs from a script she wrote with Jon Raymond, her longtime collaborator. The two of them refuse the usual shape of an artist story. There is no breakthrough and no breakdown, only a week of small obstacles stacking up. Reichardt shoots the making of the sculptures in patient close-up, hands working clay and glaze under flat Pacific Northwest light. The sound design favors the hum of the kiln and the scrape of tools over any swelling score. An injured pigeon becomes Lizzy’s reluctant responsibility, and the film gives the bird the same unhurried attention it gives the art.
This is a film about the gap between the work and the life that surrounds it. Lizzy wants quiet and time and a shower that runs hot, and the world keeps handing her interruptions instead. Reichardt understands that art does not get made in moments of clarity. It gets made in the cracks between obligations, exhausted and annoyed. The film is small on purpose, and its modesty is the whole argument.