Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)

Michelle Williams’ ‘Fabelmans’-esque origin story? It starts with PTA and Björk

- By Glenn Whipp

LOS ANGELES >> Michelle Williams has been talking about artistic journeys — her own and the one at the heart of “The Fabelmans,” the film that just earned her a fifth Oscar nomination — and she pulls out her phone to show me a photo of her 17-yearold daughter, Matilda, joyfully holding her little baby brother, the 3-month-old currently sleeping in Williams’ room here at the Hotel Bel-Air.

Matilda is wearing a Bob Dylan T-shirt, which Williams bought and constantly wore half a lifetime ago when she was a teenager living in Wilmington, North Carolina, and shooting “Dawson’s Creek.” Williams has long wanted to take Matilda to Wilmington, but that’s a road trip that hasn’t happened yet. “I always thought, maybe I’ll get a job, and it would take me back,” Williams says. “Maybe someday.”

Williams was 17 when she went to Wilmington in 1998 to begin her six-year run on “Dawson’s Creek.” It wasn’t long after she had moved from San Diego to Los Angeles, living on her own as an emancipate­d minor, sleeping on the floor on a foam mattress, subsisting mostly on takeout pizza.

“I was totally undevelope­d in so many ways,” Williams says. “I was living some aspects of an adult life, sure. But I didn’t go to college. I wasn’t influenced by my high school peers. I was a small-town girl, having grown up in Montana and then moved to San Diego for a little bit and now, here I was, really trying to grab onto things.”

In Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” a lightly fictionali­zed account of the filmmaker’s family life and burgeoning passion for filmmaking, Williams plays Mitzi, a version of his mother, Leah, a talented pianist attempting to balance her artistic impulses with being a wife and mother. Williams could relate with the life passages of both the movie’s son and mom, knowing firsthand the singlemind­ed pursuit of a youthful dream and the choices you make as an adult to harmonize your children’s needs with your own.

With acting preempting the chance for a formal education, Williams says her “college campus” rotated between a Wilmington record store called CD Alley, a DVD shop, the name of which is lost to the sands of time, and the local Barnes & Noble.

If someone were to write a “Fabelmans”-esque origin story of her artistic awakening, it would start, Williams says, with her watching the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, particular­ly “Magnolia,” a movie about loneliness and loss, familial dysfunctio­n and apocalypti­c visions.

“That just scorched me from the inside out,” Williams says of the 1999 film. “But all his movies scorch me with their observatio­ns and performanc­es and humanity. As a young woman, I was really struck by his flawed and difficult characters. I thought, ‘If I can love them, can I allow myself the same love for my own flaws and difficulti­es?’ I found those characters so beautiful. They challenged my sense of myself. They gave me a window into the possibilit­ies of cinema and who I could be as a person.”

Right around this time, Fred Champion, who owned Wilmington’s CD Alley and hosted hundreds of concerts, movie screenings and theater performanc­es from his downtown loft, gave Williams a Björk CD. She pressed play and started crying, simply because she didn’t know how to make sense of what she was hearing. Quite simply, Björk broke the way Williams understood the nature of sound.

“When someone hands you Björk, it becomes this very important moment,” Williams, 42, says. “You listen to it, you adhere to it and you stick it to yourself where there are these gaps and you need something to fill them in until you can flesh them out yourself.”

As she matured as a woman and an actor, Williams found herself drawn to characters that some might call difficult, headstrong or unlikable. Some of these women have been seen in her four collaborat­ions with filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, including the upcoming A24 release “Showing Up,” in which Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor navigating a series of annoyances before the opening of her new show. Lizzy’s behavior could be read as irritable and harsh — or, if you’re more charitable and observant, altogether human.

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