Fate can have a bittersweet sense of timing, and Michelle Williams understands this better than most. A 2008 that started bleakly with the passing of Heath Ledger, her former partner and the father of her daughter, has ended as a professional banner year for the 28 year-old actress.
A triptych of startling performances in a disparate array of projects — Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary,” Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” and, most prominently, Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” — have made this the year Williams consolidated the Oscar-nominated promise she demonstrated as a member of strong indie ensembles in the likes of “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Station Agent,” and emerged as a great, free-standing actor in her own right.
Further accolades have rolled in, with her tricky, film-carrying performance in “Wendy and Lucy” earning her an Independent Spirit nod and a Best Actress award from the Toronto critics, while in the background, her late ex remains the year’s most talked-about thespian. When she sighs wistfully over the phone from New York and says that it’s been “a weird year,” that barely seems to cover it.
It’s another curious reversal that the film largely responsible for making this such a big year for Williams truthfully couldn’t be any smaller. “Wendy and Lucy” is a brilliant, elegiac piece of Americana that easily ranks among the year’s finest films. The story of a young, broke drifter, Wendy, whose already fragile existence collapses when she is separated from her best friend Lucy, a yellow-gold mongrel, it inauspiciously came her way as a short story (“Train Choir,” by co-scripter Jon Raymond) with a brief note attached — the lean script still uncompleted.
“Todd Haynes recommended it to me,” she says, referring to the iconoclastic auteur who directed her in last year’s “I’m Not There.” “He’s a mutual friend of mine and Kelly’s, and he thought we’d be a good fit. So I read it — I mean, I’d be stupid not to trust the judgment of someone like Todd.”