It’s rarely easy for an established television actor to make a smooth transition from the small screen to the big screen.  Michelle Williams, best known as Jen from TV’s long running soap Dawson’s Creek, is clearly a performer caught in the crossroads.

After a six year stint Dawson’s finally wound up production in 2003, destined to spend its afterlife wafting through syndicated TV and DVD collections.  While freeing her from its shooting schedules and associated responsibilities the show also presented Williams, like so many budding screen divas before her, a strenuous challenge: to escape Hollywood’s relentless propensity for stereotype or become the latest in tv-to-film crossover casualties.

Williams’ presence in Dawson’s Creek, however ensconced it may have been in adolescence and young adult nuance, donated the show’s acting caliber a gravity and authenticity mostly bereft in its other performers.  But the show’s continuous spatter of indulgent monologues from excessively articulate characters didn’t come close to providing the chops Williams was hungry to chew on.

“That (Dawson’s Creek) was an exercise in memory,” she recalls.  “We would have twelve pages to do in an afternoon, paragraph then paragraph then paragraph.  But then your mind works like a sieve and the words don’t really make an imprint on your mind, they just kind of pass through you so that you can make room for the next onslaught.  That’s kind of like being on autopilot, talking like that, because nobody talks like that!”

After Dawson’s Williams raised eyebrows in a small 2003 film, The Station Man, but it would be her next role - a new project associated with revered filmmaker Ang Lee – that would generate her first real sun bake in the limelight of critical acclaim.  Brokeback Mountain, dubbed by some circles as ‘Hollywood’s first epic gay cowboy movie,’ has drawn many thrills for Williams including a Golden Globe nomination and, according to rumours humming through the Hollywood grape vine, she may also be in possible content for an Oscar when the Academy Awards arrive in March. 

In Brokeback Williams plays Alma, wife of Ennis (Heath Ledger) a modern cowboy who meets and falls in love with Jack Twist (Jake Gylenhaal).  Set against the sweeping vistas of Wyoming and Texas the film has a melancholic charm that is largely the work of Ang Lee’s evocative direction.  In a recent interview Ledger spoke of Lee as an introverted and difficult to read director, recalling that on the set he was a quiet and not particularly complimentary to work with.

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Williams agrees.  “He keeps a lot to himself.  He looks like a man sitting on a giant secret and he was. I don’t know why I guess, but that’s his process.

“At round tables and at screenings listening to him (Ang Lee) talk, I had no idea how much was going on for him and how personal he felt about the story…He talked about how it related to his childhood, his adulthood, his marriage and his children.  It really overwhelmed me.  I got a little weepie because I had no idea how personally he took it.”

Signing onto Brokeback Mountain presented number of alluring pluses for Williams: a polished screenplay based on a short story from Pultizer prize winning author E. Annie Proulx, the involvement of Ang Lee with the project, the buzz of a potentially topical and well publicised studio release and the bonus of two strapping young stars to work with.  Rather than nominating her most compelling attraction to the project Williams says all the elements, especially the film’s script, just seemed perfect for her.

“It was everything all at once,” she says.  “It was like a bomb going off.  You couldn’t believe how perfect the combination was.  The script was the very first thing and it was flawless, so involving to read.  I was happy just to have read it.”

Her rosy sentiments towards the film are justifiable: it is widely regarded as one of the best American art movies of 2005, though her opinion of the film is no doubt more than a tad skewed by her personal stakes in the project.  It was, after all, the meeting ground for her and Ledger who, they happily claim, met and fell in love on the set.  They now have a young baby, Matilda.

After watching the film for the first time together Williams and Ledger left unsure whether it was a masterpiece or a dud.  Seeing each other together as a married couple on the big screen, no doubt, would have been a surreal experience. 

“I just didn’t know what to think,” she says.  “It was strange to sit there next to him (Ledger) and watch ourselves age, argue, fight, divorce and have children…It was an unnatural experience and a little unsettling.  It took me seeing it another time to understand what was going on and to get past being distracted by my face or my voice or Heather’s presence.  I just needed more time to process it.”

Whether or not Williams will be rewarded Academy ceremony kudos, it’s clear that she has grown through the process, challenged in ways the Dawson’s Creek module never could.  Loaded with looks, her character in Brokeback Mountain conveys more through expressions than dialogue.  “I find that’s always the hardest work and such an important lesson to learn,” she says, “because it’s so beautifully thought and researched and put together and constructed. 

“The job can be easy,” she adds.  “But it’s those silences, those blank pages, where it’s up to you to communication non-verbally.  That’s where the challenge is.”

 

 

Article by Luke Buckmaster