Total Recall: Michelle Williams' Best Movies
We count down the best-reviewed work of the Oz the Great and Powerful star.
From a prime-time soap sweetheart on Dawson's Creek to a film star with three Academy Award nominations (and counting) under her belt, Michelle Williams has come a long way over the course of her 20-year career -- and this weekend, she steps into one of Hollywood's most hallowed bubbles, playing Glinda the Good Witch in Sam Raimi's Oz the Great and Powerful. We decided now would be the perfect time to take an appreciative look back at some of her proudest critical moments, and you know what that means: It's time to Total Recall, Michelle Williams style!
69%
10. Synecdoche, New York
After accumulating loads of Hollywood cachet by penning the screenplays for such critical darlings as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Charlie Kaufman decided what he really wanted to do was direct -- and his debut, 2008's Synecdoche, New York, turned out to be every bit as original (and/or willfully obtuse) as his fans could have hoped. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a miserable theater director who receives a MacArthur grant and promptly spirals into madness (and Williams as one of his decades-in-development play's leading ladies), Synecdoche confounded a fair number of critics who thought Kaufman had finally lost the line between profundity and pomposity -- but for scribes like Christopher Orr of the New Republic, it was "a huge film about puny sentiments, an anti-heroic epic of failure, remorse, alienation, and self-pity. It may not be the best film of the year, but it is very likely to be the most extraordinary."
70%
9. Dick
With a pair of bikini-topped girls on the poster, the involvement of someone named Deep Throat, and a title like Dick, you might expect something other than a cheerful political parody from director Andrew Fleming's 1999 release. But all winking aside, Dick is actually a fairly clever re-imagining of the Watergate scandal, with a pair of teenage girls (played by Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst) who stumble into jobs as White House dog walkers after unwittingly ruining the break-in -- and subsequently wind up altering the course of the entire administration. Mused Sue Pierman of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "The film is such a delight not only because it's clever, but because it so perfectly captures the era."
78%
8. Take This Waltz
Given that she'd already portrayed a marriage in decline in Blue Valentine, it might have seemed like backtracking for Michelle Williams to play another soon-to-be-former spouse in 2012's Take This Waltz, but Sarah Polley's bittersweet drama brought a few twists to the table -- including casting Seth Rogen as Williams' cuckolded husband. Featuring solid supporting turns from Luke Kirby and Sarah Silverman, Waltz proved that in the right hands, a familiar tale can still ring true -- even when it's populated with characters the audience may not always like -- as long as it's willing to tell the truth. As Bill Goodykoontz put it in his review for the Arizona Republic, "If uncompromising honesty is the quality you seek for a film, Michelle Williams is your go-to star."
84%
7. My Week with Marilyn
Attempting to portray a screen legend like Marilyn Monroe seems like the kind of thankless task for which a director would need to find an inexperienced actress who didn't know any better -- but fortunately for Simon Curtis, whose My Week with Marilyn adapts a pair of Colin Clark memoirs inspired by his time on the set of Monroe's The Prince and the Showgirl, Michelle Williams was ready and willing to take the job. And while the events that unfold in the movie amount to little more than a footnote in Monroe's story, her empathetic work in the role helped lift My Week above rote biopic material; as Stephen Whitty put it for the Newark Star-Ledger, "No other actress has quite understood the frustrated, maternal side of Monroe that informed so many of her performances. Or quite recaptured that absolutely luminous quality she had on film."
85%
6. Wendy and Lucy
Williams has a reputation for picking films that tend toward the depressing end of the dramatic spectrum, and projects like 2008's Wendy and Lucy are a good example of why. Here, Williams plays a woman who tires of her lonely life in small-town Indiana and decides to set out for a new life in Alaska -- but she only gets as far as Oregon before falling victim to a bleak comedy of errors that starts with her car breaking down and doesn't let up until she's been arrested and lost her dog. While it might be short on chuckles, director/co-writer Kelly Reichardt's study of a life gone wrong proved powerfully resonant for critics like the New York Observer's Andrew Sarris, who wrote, "To her credit, Ms. Reichardt never allows her camera to become a voyeuristic witness to a young woman in distress. Instead, it remains focused on a largely indifferent American landscape of strangers in perpetual motion to nowhere."
James Faidley
I'm an idiot, i could've sworn that was the woman from Drive
Mar 6 - 04:56 PM
Devin Stevens
Carey Mulligan! I thought the same thing man. I have no idea who Michelle is.
Mar 6 - 04:58 PM
Dave J
Then you must be quite young then or don't watch movies very much since she's somewhat more consistent in terms of films than Carey Mulligan! The fact that she's also the only person who had Heath Ledger's only baby before he unfortunately overdosed himself! I can bet you anything she's going to get an Oscar one of these days since her roles are not the same as the one she did on Dawson Creek!
Mar 6 - 05:22 PM
King Crunk
She is one of the best actresses around. She's quite a fox, too. Your loss for not knowing who she is.
Mar 6 - 06:21 PM
Sean Patrick
The short hair's gotta go, though. So much prettier with long hair...
Mar 6 - 08:02 PM
Bradly Martin
Michelle is fantastic buuuuut I think Carey is better. Michelle is usually a fantastic actress in Bad movies. She played an amazing Monroe for example but wow that movie had nothing interesting to say about Monroe. She was great in Shutter Island but if your a huge fan of the book the movie was a huge let down. Carrey on the other hand is fantastic and in great movies, she was also in one of the best episodes of Doctor who of all time "Blink" while Michelle's tv days are full of Dawson's creek.
SO yeah a bit of a rant to say I disagree with you Dave J.
Mar 6 - 09:52 PM
Michael Greenwaldt
It seems to me you haven't seen her best performances/films, which is why you think that. Of course you may not even like her films.
My favorite Michelle Williams movies are Brokeback Mountain, Wendy & Lucy (she was robbed of an Oscar nomination for this), Blue Valentine, The Station Agent, Imaginary Heroes (she isn't in this one a lot though), If These Walls Could Talk 2, Dick, Prozac Nation, The Baxter, and there are others I've enjoyed as well. I thought My Week With Marilyn was enjoyable fluff, but it's her amazing performance that makes the movie. It deserved to be in a better film. She's a terrific actress. I adore Carey Mulligan as well though. Both would be two of my favorites. And as a teenager I was a HUGE Dawson's Creek fan and thought she was great on the show. She was my favorite of the cast. Re-watching the show recently with my friend's daughter I still think she was great on it. I'm glad she's having the best career of any of the stars of that show. She's the most talented, IMO. And one day she will win an Oscar for something.
Mar 7 - 04:08 AM
Bradly Martin
I thought she was a very well acted plot device in Brokeback Mountain. She wasn't so much a character as a reminder for all of us to root for the adulterous husband. I think she'll be nominated a couple more times but never win. The Academy hates self loathing characters who never overcome there problems. I'd say Blue Valentine was her most impressive role in her most impressive movie but again the academy would never award a character like that. Not Fair.
Mar 7 - 08:13 AM
Jameson Bradford
I don't think she was there as a reminder for us not to root for the adulterous husband, but to remind us that when we hide our true selves, there can be a lot of collateral damage and many people get hurt.
Mar 7 - 08:31 AM
Dave J
Actually, I've never made any rants about who's the better actress between Michelle Williams and Mulligan but I will point out that while Williams has been nominated about three times at the Oscars, Mulligan has only been nominated once!
Mar 7 - 04:13 PM
Bradly Martin
pfffft nomination counts don't matter. Amy Adams has been nominated 4 times but I'd never say that means she's a better actress than Michelle Williams. I know Michelle is a great actress and honestly my attitude about how over rated she is stems back to Brokeback mountain and Shutter Island. Her character was so over the top Mean spirited (in brokeback) and noticeably Insane with in the first seconds of her scene in Shutter Island. The characters lacked subtlety. Thats probably more the screen writers fault though then her own. Damn Shutter Island being dumbed down for the silver screen. Pissed me off.
Mar 10 - 01:03 AM
Dave J
Well, then that's your problem because those roles at best supporting roles if you can call them that real purpose is to support first starring actors!And you know there are lots of films where actors had minor only roles- some are memorable but most of them are not! Look at it from her POV, if it wasn't for one of those dismisable roles she would not have met Heath in the first place! If you think that some supporting players are "one note" than most often that is more of the directors fault than it would be for the actors playing them!
Mar 11 - 01:24 PM
Michael Baldelli
Seriously? Where have you been? It's not like she only does Indie films either. She was in Shutter Island too and has been on TV since the 90's.
Mar 8 - 10:35 AM
Lisa Mason
what Adam implied I am impressed someone able to earn $5500 in 4 weeks just adding movie clips. did you see this page http://cutt.us/Career
Mar 11 - 06:34 AM
Mick Travis
Michelle did BLUE VALENTINE with Ryan Gosling though!
Mar 6 - 05:52 PM
Mathew Jung
Come on! She (Williams) earned her keep as Marilyn Monroe and has been around much longer than Mulligan, although I can see the mixup; I sometimes get these two (fine) actresses mixed up a little but not enough to truly confuse them. Both are great...There are so many duel actor / actor & actress / actress doppelgängers, see "Dylan McDermott-Mulrony" or "Bill Pullman / Bill Paxton", etc.
Mar 7 - 08:23 AM