Kelly Reichardt teams up with Michelle Williams again in another delightfully understated film. Once again it’s set in Portland, Oregon and being centered around the Oregon College of Art and Craft (OCAC), just about everyone in it is an artist of some stripe. But as this film shows, not all artists get to be famous or rich or successful. As usual, Reichardt’s work is so subtle that it might not seem like it has much of a point. But the soft rivalry between Lizzy and Jo, highlighting how the latter is just ever so slightly closer to the artist that the former aspires to be, is good enough for me.

Lizzy makes a living as an administrative assistant for her mother at OCAC but really thinks of herself as a sculptor, spending her free time on making clay figures of women. Her neighbor Jo is also her landlord and an artist who makes larger installations. For days now Lizzy has been complaining about the lack of hot water in her unit but Jo has been too busy with her upcoming shows to deal with it. She gets visibly annoyed when she sees Jo hanging up a tire swing in her backyard. She asks for a day off of work from her mother to finish a series of sculptures for her own show. But the night before her cat mauls a pigeon that has gotten inside her apartment and she chucks it out the window. The next day Jo finds the injured pigeon and decides to rescue it. Lizzy doesn’t admit that it was her cat that attacked it and becomes resentful when Jo asks her to help care for the pigeon when she is busy, yet ends up bonding with it. Meanwhile Lizzy is also worried about her father being taken advantage of by transient guests who are practically strangers and her reclusive and delusional brother Sean.

Set amidst a leafy neighborhood and a very pleasant-looking college campus, this is a film in which practically every person who appears onscreen is a creative artistic type. Everywhere you look, students are painting, dancing, making crafts with their hands. Lizzy’s father is a potter and Sean digs giant holes in his backyard which he calls his own art project. I detect a very gentle teasing in here about the proliferation of artists, each of them working independently on their own creative vision. They diligently attend each other’s shows but have little to comment on them except for a very safe ‘it’s good”. If you’re just one artist in a the middle of a thousand of them, how do you stand out and be unique? One scene shows Lizzy interacting with a guest artist the college is hosting who we can presume is more successful and well-known. The artist thanks Lizzy for making the flyers for her event and Lizzy comments that she hasn’t read the article the college published about her. It’s a very low-key, subtle form of humor but that’s what I love about Reichardt’s work.

At the heart of the film is the love-hate relationship between Lizzy and Jo. Though Lizzy works for her mother and her job doesn’t seem overly onerous, she somewhat resents having to work for a living. By contrast, Jo has it made in her mind by being a landlord and is therefore able to devote more of her time to her art. We also see Jo hosting a merry gathering of friends at her place while Lizzy trudges back home from work by herself. It’s a reminder that many, perhaps most, artists live lives that are totally mundane and unglamorous. Reichardt’s genius however is to show that while Lizzy may be an irritable woman who lives by herself with her cat, it doesn’t mean there any points of brightness in her life. As much as she pretends otherwise, she cares about the well-being of the pigeon more than Jo herself. She is a worrier with too much anxiety but is genuinely concerned about her family. Most of all, despite the sniping, she actually is friends with Jo as evidenced by how the film ends.

It’s strange that this project about originally meant to be a biopic of a real Canadian artist who was also a landlord. You can discern some elements of that here but this film is really something else entirely. Michelle Williams pulls off an impressive transformation into frumpy woman fast approaching middle-age and Reichardt once again manages to identify and make a film about another kind of micro-drama that others would pass over. I don’t personally identify with artists at all so I’d never consider this among her best work but it is very much in line with her style.