Michelle Williams gave a stunning performance. Her best moment in the film is when she sees Ennis and Jack kissing. I've seen the movie twice and both times, the audience laughed during that scene, but I think it was nervous laughter, because they know what she's going to see when she opens the door. But it's amazing how in just a matter of seconds she transforms from a trusting, if confused, housewife, to a person filled with shock and anxiety, all without speaking a word.
Entertainment Weekly describes it like this:
Ang Lee admits that if he knew Michelle Williams only from her TV work, six long years on the teen sudser Dawson's Creek, he probably wouldn't ever have considered her for Brokeback Mountain. Luckily for her, Lee's never heard of Capeside. Instead, he fell hard for Williams' small and graceful turn in The Station Agent, and later for her keen sense of vulnerability in person. "Something about her," he says, "you look at her and you wish her happiness."
As Alma, a Wyoming ranch hand's afterthought of a wife, Williams is a revelation. In the Annie Proulx story on which the movie is based, Alma is an angry flint of a woman who turns to steel when she realizes that her husband may be gay. Williams plays her instead as a lost, lonely girl, in over her head with bills and two babies, desperate for some returned loyalty and affection from her man (played by real-life love Heath Ledger). In one of the film's many gut-punch moments, she opens the door and sees her husband kissing another man. Williams' face pools with color, and then tightens and blanches - the vision of her life as she knew it evaporating right there - before she retreats into their apartment without a word. "Both she and Heath were so understated," marvels Lee. "But for her, it's even less work. It feels like no performing, like she was living in that place. I really love that. It doesn't come very often. Trust me - I've made nine movies."
Williams knows what a gift of a role she received. "They're the kind of words you wait you whole life to be able to say," she says of the script. And now, at 25, with her first Oscar nomination, maybe people will finally let her leave Dawson's Creek in the past.
