November 02, 2010 04:30PM EDT
Best in Show: Olivia Williams
The undersung British actress Olivia Williams is at the peak of her powers. She proves it again in The Ghost Writer.
For this week’s Best in Show, our finale for now, we've changed things up: this one’s a performance you can discover on DVD. Previously, we’ve been covering only theatrical offerings, and—to let you in on an open secret—on at least two occasions the columns have been spiritually akin to those “For Your Consideration” Oscar ads. Some performances are merely the best within the film that houses them. Others, like Jacki Weaver’s incredible work in Animal Kingdom, are among the very best of the year and ought to win larger audiences and the Academy’s approval. This week’s recipient is Olivia Williams, who, one could argue, falls into the latter category for her work in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010; now on DVD).
The 42-year-old British actress, previously best known as Bruce Willis’s wife in The Sixth Sense (1999) and the object of competing affections in the cult comedy Rushmore (1998), has been hitting new career heights of late. She delivered arguably her career best work as Adelle DeWitt, the dangerous executive of TV’s Dollhouse (2009-2010), and she recently provided sympathetic support to Best Picture nominee An Education (2009) and the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival; on DVD from Tribeca Film in January).
In the insinuatingly clever The Ghost Writer, she plays the enigmatic Ruth Lang. Ruth is the wife of a former Prime Minister Alan Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who is writing his memoirs (with a little help from Ewan McGregor) while in political exile in America. Alan’s been accused of war crimes and all hell has broken loose. Williams is still stuck in her usual supporting mode, but how supportive her character is… that’s another question entirely.
Even our first two introductions to Ruth are contradictory. We hear her before we see her, screaming up a storm offscreen, suggesting the stereotype of the angry frosty wife. Her husband’s assistant Amelia (Kim Cattrall) claims that Ruth is “having one of those days.” But the next time we see her, framed in the ghost writer’s doorway, she offers him a sympathetic ear and takes him for a walk on the beach. She doesn’t seem unhinged at all, just a touch weary and maybe too observant of subtle shifts in the behavior of others for her own peace of mind. She tells the ghost writer, who functions as the audience proxy into this unfamiliar world, that he was her idea. But even as she’s complimenting his writing, she’s slipping in snarky digs at his talents. 
Throughout the course of the film, we come to appreciate her as a straight shooter, a sly observer, and a confident powerful woman, but none of these character traits come without visible cracks or contradictions. If she’s a straight shooter, why is she secretive? If she can read between the lines so immediately, why does she seem trapped, and for years at that, by the whims of others? And if she’s so confident, why is she so jealous? To Williams’s credit, Ruth never feels like several different people (which can sometimes happen in mysteries); instead, she just seems like a complicated woman.
While the hidden agendas of each of The Ghost Writer’s characters are continually called into question, Ruth remains the film’s most unknowable figure—even though she’s the only character who quickly lets the ghost writer (and, thus, the audience) into her confidence. Williams has always been adept at double-edged line readings and flipping our first impression on its head. She used that to spectacular effect in Dollhouse, morphing over the series’ long arc from icy villainess to something closer to an amoral heroine; she’s adept at conveying internal mystery, too. This makes her, then, the perfect vessel for this film’s own slipperiness: is it a political satire, a noir, a B movie thriller, an old school mystery?
The Ghost Writer keeps you guessing. So, too, does Olivia Williams. She can’t be pinned down.
Click on the poster to find the DVD of The Ghost Writer.
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