Somewhat improbably, I've only seen three of Olivia Williams' films: Rushmore, An Education, and, just last month, The Ghost Writer. Her turn in the latter as Ruth, the wife of disgraced former British P. M. Adam Lang [Pierce Brosnan], is a marvel of tightly wound fury and brittle, self-deprecating humor. She skulks about the gray-on-gray shingle and concrete Brutalist beach house [borrowed from her husband's publisher] in high dudgeon, her ire seemingly the only thing preventing her from being crushed underneath the outsize wall art and huge plate-glass windows that don't frame the drear wintery landscape as much as invite prying eyes to look in.
I got to thinking about Williams' performance as the scary-smart political spouse again recently for two reasons. When I was poking around the Internets looking for photos of her Education co-star Carey Mulligan, I came across the snap above, from the L.A. premiere of the film. As anyone who I was with at the last ever Film Prom [a.k.a. the 2009 New York Film Festival opening night party at Tavern on the Green] can attest, I was wearing that same dress. Which was not new then and had done tours of duty at any number of weddings throughout the Aughts. [It packs like a dream.] Let starlet Mulligan borrow couture. Olivia Williams was wearing an old, off-the-rack Diane von Furstenburg dress on the red carpet! Heart her!
But not as much as noted writer-of-mash-notes-to-actresses David Thomson of the Guardian does. A smidge of his tut-tutting about how under-appreciated Williams is from early April:
...we've probably only seen a fraction of what Williams can do. So here she comes now as the former prime minister's wife in The Ghost Writer, the new Roman Polanski film. She plays older here than she has before, bitchier and more knowing, and she's very good, or as good as the limits of the piece allow her to be.
"Older" is an understatement, although that may have something to do with the lines -- oh so rare in her industry -- visible on her face in the photo that runs with Thomson's piece and on screen opposite Brosnan. You see, Ruth Lang is supposed to have met her husband Adam when they were at university. Only Williams was born in 1968; Brosnan in 1953. Is that some sort of Jessie Royce Landis shit or what?
Looking your age now means looking older than you are, a bigger crime even than wearing a not-new dress to a movie premiere. That's nice casting sleight-of-hand in a story that hinges on appearances being deceiving. It's perhaps part of the reason I found the disposition of Williams' character at the end of The Ghost Writer is so satisfying and startling. Its swiftness rivals the kick-in-the-teeth shocks of The Spanish Prisoner and reminds the viewer that building lasting careers in politics or the movies are all versions of the same long con. Or, as another "bitchier and more knowing" Polanski character once put it, "Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."
