Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Kelly Reichardt excels like no other filmmaker at conveying the subtle ravages of time on earth. She brilliantly tackled the epic theme of America’s western expansion in the revisionist westerns Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow and eco-terrorism in Night Moves. But it is the day-to-day yield and subtext of history and politics that most concern her: a young housewife facing down ennui in River of Grass; a friendship deteriorating with age in Old Joy; a young woman seeking a better life unprepared in Wendy and Lucy; women extracting meaning from desolation in the post-feminist Certain Women. For Reichardt, even subdued lives are fully lived and merit sympathetic attention. They include, she insists in Showing Up, the quietly precarious existences of artists. Wise, nuanced, and penetrating, the film is also stealthily hilarious.
