Steven Spielberg thought of Michelle Williams to play his mother in The Fabelmans after seeing the actress in the 2019 miniseries Fosse/Verdon, in which Williams gives life to the dancer Gwen Verdon, wife of Bob Fosse and a true Broadway celebrity of the fifties. It may sound strange, but the truth is that that series focused on the adulthood of an artist who was beginning to experience her professional decline in the mid-seventies, and Michelle Williams, who is now 42 years old, knew how to give her an explosive maturity unknown in the repertoire of an actress who represents like few others the most naturalistic tradition of American independent cinema.
Williams has been nominated for an Oscar three times —for Brokeback Mountainin 2006, Blue Valentinein 2011, and manchester by the seain 2017—, and now it is for the fourth time thanks to Mitzi, a character far removed from her collaborations with the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt, whose last film together, showing up, is a new jewel in the filmography of both. In The Fabelmansthe actress abandons that record to enter a more expressionist terrain through a complex and fascinating character.
Mitzi is a petite and vigorous Jewish woman, who put aside her dreams of being a pianist to become a housewife. As a good misfit, Mitzi does not settle and ends up turning her family life into an extension of her fantasies. That makes her a wonderful and troubled mother, a woman willing to have fun with her children, whether it’s chasing a tornado or buying a monkey, but unable to give up herself for them.
There are sequences to remember in The Fabelmans and in almost all of them the center is Mitzi. Like when he dances in a white dress that reveals his naked body and one of his daughters tries to stop him from dying of shame. Or when her son, that is, a teenage Spielberg, shows him, using a home movie, her secret that he has discovered with her camera and that the boy is unable to put into words. Everything indicates that Williams will lose the Oscar again. It matters little: the way in which he reveals to the viewer the secret of ET’s orphanhood is priceless.
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