Wendy and Lucy (2008)

I didn't watch Dawson's Creek on TV, but I still think Michelle Williams is terrific. Before Brokeback Mountain (2005), there was Dick (1999), a fantasy that owed something to Forrest Gump, by imagining two teenage girls (Williams and Kirsten Dunst) involved in every aspect of Watergate (my then 9 year old loved it, too). The following year she (Williams, not my daughter) starred in a segment of HBO's If These Walls Could Talk 2, as a college student in 1972 who incurs the disdain of her feminist lesbian friends by having an affair with a woman (Chlöe Sevigny) who wears men's clothes (the other two segments, also about lesbians, and the prequel, If These Walls Could Talk, about abortion, were very good, too). She was a bright spot in the quirky Synecdoche, New York (2008). Now Williams, the never-married widow of Heath Ledger, is in every scene of this little indie film that was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and won 3 critics' awards, including one for Williams. Don't look for laughs here, and, when you watch it at home (I think it has left most theatres by now), try to darken your room, because there are some dimly lit scenes. Williams embodies the quiet desperation of her character Wendy. Her hair is short, severe, and brown, she is skinny and hunched over, and she only smiles when interacting with her dog Lucy. Two of her three most emotive scenes are veiled: one with a blanket covering all but her eyes and another shot through a chain link fence, but we feel her pain.