How Michelle Williams found the music of Mitzi Fabelman
NEW YORK (AP) — In both Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” and Kelly Reichardt’s upcoming “Showing Up,” Michelle Williams plays women where life — societal hurdles and daily nuisances — gets in the way of self-expression.
Mitzi Fabelman, the early-1960s matriarch based on Spielberg’s own mother, has given up her career as a talented concert pianist to raise a family. It’s a sacrifice that haunts her. It’s also a gift that radiates from her.
“I think of her as the piano that she loved so much,” Williams says. “That range was inside of her. That musicality. That emotional dexterity. That was her art. That music flowed through her, and it affected how deeply she could feel. She was the tornado that she drove into.”
As an actor, Williams has, herself, steered straight into some indelibly tempestuous characters: the romantic of “Blue Valentine,” Marilyn Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn,” the anguished ex-wife of “Manchester by the Sea.” But if there was ever a role that showed the extent of Williams’ remarkable range – her every-note-on-the-piano “emotional dexterity” – it’s Mitzi.
The fictionalized but autobiographical film, currently playing in theaters, centers on Spielberg’s coming of age as a filmmaker. But Mitzi is the film’s aching soul. At turns despondent, playful and ebullient, Mitzi’s moods swing with a quicksilver melancholy, caught between undying devotion to her children and a stifling of her dreams. In many ways, she gives them to her son. It’s Mitzi who gifts young Sammy/Spielberg his first movie camera. “Movies are dreams that you never forget,” she tells him at his first trip to the cinema.
How life filters into work is deeply embedded in Williams’ emotional life as an actor, one drawn from wellsprings of...