[Safe*With*Your*Ego]

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Michelle Williams on her cinematic taste > Videos > ReelTalk TV

official site: WENDY and LUCY

On Michelle as Wendy:

"In scene after scene, Williams is stunning in her ability to hold back, able to show us the thousands of emotions in her head by the way her eyes dart around or the way she keeps her face tilted downwards or the way she recovers from a startling incident by pacing around a gas station bathroom. When she shares scenes with the adorable dog that plays Lucy, the old adage about actors not wanting to share the screen with a child or a dog for fear of being upstaged turns out to be false in this case; there is no stealing a scene in the entire film from Williams." The Frenzy On

"She's in every scene and often she's not playing off another actor. She radiates the despair, loneliness, and fear of a woman in her position, and we never doubt her," he wrote." Reuters

"Instead of a musical soundtrack there is, for the most part, the sighing of the wind in the trees, the rumbling of freight trains and trucks and, sometimes, the absent-minded humming of Michelle Williams, who plays Wendy, a young woman drifting through Oregon and Washington on her way to Alaska." NYTimes

"Williams, who fits into Reichardt’s lo-fi world with surprising ease given her Hollywood pedigree, does so quietly. Even her emotional reactions — fright, grief, anger — have a subdued quality that makes them seem more genuine, not less. It’s not common to see a name actor in a movie this simple — or one that asks this much of the audience. Williams pulls it off without upstaging anyone." metro

"Michelle Williams delivers an unassuming, committed performance that announces her as one of the greatest actresses in cinema today, though it may be too quiet and "simple" to garner the attention it deserves during awards season. Williams wore no makeup and went without showering for weeks to submerge herself in the role but, as Reichardt joked on stage in Toronto this year, "She still looks like that. I hate her." Williams also provides the only musical cue in the film before the end credits, an ethereal, melodic humming that appears out of nowhere in the opening tracking shot but returns as diegetic sound later in the film. It is another beautiful touch in a truly beautiful film, and I think I´ll be humming it for the next several months."DVDTOWN

"Williams' evocative, understated performance in this gentle hard-luck tale seems like the perfect marriage of actress and material. She has a stillness about her, with underlying reserves of emotion. Wendy is so self-contained, she can appear stoic." USATODAY

"Williams is on very low simmer here; Wendy is too exhausted to express how frightened she is, but Williams’ eyes tell most of the story." eFilmCritic

"The entire story is told through Wendy's face, and Ms. Williams - always reliable in supporting roles - carries the film effortlessly on her shoulders. Just watch one particularly terrifying night in the woods shot almost entirely in close-up on Wendy's eyes.

So yes, "Wendy and Lucy" is about a girl searching for her lost dog. Thanks to an unyielding ending, and Ms. Williams' raw nerve of a performance, it's also, to continue the cliché, about so much more." Joe Lozito

"Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery." Village Voice

"It's dimly possible that bizarre and fortuitous circumstances that don't have much to do with "Wendy and Lucy" -- its unexpected social relevance, for instance, and Williams' relationship to a recently deceased celebrity -- will bring the film some attention, and put Williams on the outer edge of Academy Award possibility. It really couldn't befall a more deserving movie, or a more complicated performance."Beyond the Multiplex - Salon

"Reichardt's film demands that Wendy be a subtle but piercing presence, reticent yet commanding. In the past few years, Williams has buried her Dawson's Creek days and rebuilt herself as a staple of more adventurous fare, appearing both in last year's wildly brilliant I'm Not There and this year's stampeding phantasmagoria Synecdoche, New York. More endemic to her work in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Williams underplays and internalizes much of the action in Lucy, making a terrified tantrum in a gas station bathroom all the more bewildering and bracing. Williams is as graceful as she is elemental and gives, by a large margin, the best American female performance I've seen this year." Filmcritic

"With no editorial hand to guide her, Williams is given the freedom to create Wendy however she sees fit. The result is probably the most naturally performance I've seen all year, a woman who is clearly worn-out by a lifetime of **** but without the self-pity that would lead her to find some easier way of living. To call it the actress's best work ever is a laughable understatement; but even granting that, it's oddly exciting to see someone with the looks and the career to be a matinee star push herself into such challenging and (one assumes) professionally unrewarding territory. This, in a nutshell, is how I feel about Williams's performance: though I know nothing about Wendy's backstory, I still get the sense that I know who she is, kind of, just through the look on the actress's face, the way she holds herself as she walks, and her body language when she's talking to other people." Antagony

Interview: Michelle Williams, Kelly Reichardt Interview - MoviesOnline

[IloveJosh]

Thanks so much for opening this thread, Rachel

That banner is gorgeous

[Lazy]

Thanks for starting

The banner and the quotes are great!

"Frost/Nixon": Frank Langella's Tricky Dick Performance My favorite male and female performance of the year are contained within this list. Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope Pictures) Michelle Williams is so terrific in this film that there's no chance she's going to win an Oscar for it. The movie's too small to get noticed, and, unlike other recent Best Actress winners, her transformation from glamorous to ordinary is so complete that people may forget that she ever was glamorous. Kelly Reichardt's last film, Old Joy, felt a touch too schematic for me – another discussion of the fallout of the '60s and the problems of maintaining friendships over the course of a lifetime – but it's one of those rare movies that has actually stayed with me. Wendy and Lucy has no political undercurrents, no grand point to make, and so therefore it's a purer, richer and better experience all around. In a year when just about every other week had an indie featuring dead-end characters tooling around quiet corners of the country, Wendy and Lucy transcends its era to get at the legitimately timeless. In fact, there's something deeply profound, yet very postmodern, about runaway Wendy's search for her lost dog across a sleepy Oregon town sinking into poverty. Williams makes Wendy just another drifter – Reichardt provides very little clues into her life, and she doesn't intentionally beat the character down so that we'll feel like she's had a hard life. By comparison, Ballast is a Bruckheimer popcorn movie, Paranoid Park a Scott Turow airport read. At last, here it is: an American indie that moves beyond its own precious austerity to say something moving and tell a heartbreaking story. That it's sure to vanish from theaters as quickly as Old Joy did is a real shame and yet somehow fitting for a movie about a person that people tend to forget because they never stop to notice.

"Frost/Nixon": Frank Langella's Tricky Dick Performance

Wendy and Lucy: Movie Review by Joe Lozito on BigPictureBigSound

[Shadowhunter]

Thanks for starting the thread

[jen4ever]

Thanks for opening the thread, Rachel!

[Safe*With*Your*Ego]

You're all welcome If someone comes up with a title I can add it.

Another interview, this one from ABC news: Yahoo!

[IloveJosh]

Thanks, Rachel

I found another reviews:

Review: 'Wendy and Lucy' - Los Angeles Times

Stranger Offers to Find Michelle Williams’ Lost Dog - BlackBook


Interview with Kelly Reichardt:

Wendy and Lucy Director Kelly Reichardt on Michelle Williams and Why Alaska Is Overrated -- Vulture -- Entertainment & Culture Blog -- New York Magazine

[jen4ever]

Thanks for all the info, guys

[Shadowhunter]

Thanks for all the links.

[Lazy]

Thanks for the links

ETA:

That Williams carries the entire film through moments like this is a testament to her under-appreciated abilities as an actress. She's grown tremendously over the past few years, and with two films at Cannes this year (she's also got a major role in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY), she may be finally moving into a new realm in her career.

Review: Wendy and Lucy - Cinematical


'Wendy and Lucy' have the will, but is there a way? - Los Angeles Times

Michelle Williams topliner “Wendy and Lucy” translated its award buzz into a per screen average of $10,717 as it opened in two theaters to an estimated gross of $21,434. Pic, released by Oscilloscope, has cumed $28,643 since its launch last Wednesday.

'Earth Stood Still' tops at box office - Entertainment News, Film News, Media - Variety

[Shadowhunter]

Thanks for the new links

[Safe*With*Your*Ego]

Wendy & Lucy is on the list: American Film Institute Awards hail top 10 best movies of 2008 | Gold Derby | Los Angeles Times

[starzscarme]

I saw the AFI recognition on E! last night and thought it was really great. AFI is usually spot on with their selections and it can only help the film.

[Lazy]

I'm very happy AFI selected the film. This will probably bring even more buzz to the film and Michelle.

Wendy and Lucy is also in another top films list:

AP critics pick top films of 2008 The top 10 films of 2008, according to AP Movie Writer David Germain: 10. "Wendy and Lucy" — Michelle Williams is an utter heartbreaker in co-writer and director Kelly Reichardt's deceptively simple story of a down-and-out woman heading with her dog toward hopes of a better life in Alaska. Stranded in a small Northwest town where her pet goes missing, she finds mostly hardhearted indifference from the strangers she encounters — but also a glimmer or two of kindness to sustain the faltering faith that one day, things will get better.

The Associated Press: AP critics pick top films of 2008

[IloveJosh]

Great news