My Week with Marilyn

This movie would have been better if they had made it about a fictional actress based on Monroe instead of about Monroe herself.

The Goddess, filmed during Monroe's lifetime (around the time this movie is set, in fact) couldn't have used her name, and it's much the better for that constraint. The Goddess doesn't constantly force us to compare Kim Stanley's fantastic performance with the real Marilyn Monroe, because it doesn't constantly CALL her Marilyn Monroe. My Week with Marilyn doesn't give us that freedom, the freedom to appreciate Michelle Williams's performance on its own merits rather than as an impersonation of a much more charismatic and distinctive star than she is herself.

Viewers more familiar with Williams than with Monroe can rave about this performance, because they're not comparing it to anything. To them, Monroe is just a dizzy blonde standing over a subway grate with her skirt billowing up around her, and Williams plays THAT role as well as anyone else could. But she can't for one second deceive anybody who has experienced Monroe (seeing her is only part of the delight) in more than one scene from one movie.

Half of Monroe's power as a performer is in her face, one of the most beautiful and naturally expressive faces God ever made, and that's why NO actress can EVER successfully play her. No one else has that face.

Using a fictitious name would also have relieved them of having to portray the insufferably shallow and narcissistic Laurence Olivier, the most overrated actor who ever lived. I realize that they based this movie on Colin Clark's highly dubious and self-aggrandizing "memoirs" of his brief contact with Monroe, and therefore had some justification for their choices, but that was a mistake.

One of many mistakes. Worst: the stupid screenplay, which treated Clark's adolescent fantasy as truth and made it even more ludicrous than it already was. Second: the hackneyed direction that makes a story about interesting and real people seem as false as a soap opera. Third: the miscasting of every role in the movie.

Although the most egregiously miscast are Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, Dominic Cooper as Milton Greene, and plodding Julia Ormond as ethereal Vivien Leigh, NONE of the actors convincingly portray the real persons they are supposed to be. Even Judi Dench is maudlin and icky as the decidedly UN-maudlin and UN-icky Sybil Torndike. I suppose Branagh is sufficiently pretentious and boring as Olivier, but the movie would have been better without that character.

The one good thing about this movie is that it calls attention to Marilyn Monroe. If it had motivated even one person who'd never done so to watch her movies, it would have been worthwhile.

I liked this movie, it was a non-judgemental re-telling of a slice of history. I thought the performances were all very good by the leading characters. I have no idea what the real Marilyn was like and I don't think many people do, but Michelle Williams character is a more than plausible interpretation, vulnerable at times, manipulative at others, who really knows where the reality lies, but there was something for everyone's interpretation. The movie did a good job of depicting that moment in time and transporting the audience there for a couple of hours. I guess it is every man's fantasy to have this opportunity, so the story is a satisfying one for any man who has ever wondered what the real Marilyn may have been like.

Remember "The Prince And The Showgirl"? I saw it for the first time only a few years ago, after the death of all the protagonists. The miracle, and it is indeed a miracle, Marilyn felt so alive, so contemporary. In "My Week With Marilyn" Michelle Williams is full of light, the real light, the internal one, while everyone else is deadly opaque. The film feels like a very low budget TV movie and not even the grand manors and colleges manage to give it the production value, the story deserved. But Michelle Williams is truly enchanting. Not that she is a dead ringer for the real Marilyn. So much more demure, smaller breasts, smaller behind, only her strange kind of melancholia seems to match the original one and some of that magic essence appears to be in place. Eddie Redmayne, the narrator, whose POV drives the story is rather a cool fish. His grasp is so limp and small that I was kept longing for more. Kenneth Brannagh is very funny and Judi Dench, terrific, but Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh is just so wrong one wants to fast-forward, unfortunately, that's impossible right now. But, let's go back to Michelle Williams, the one reason to see this film and in itself she's reason enough.

Here's the thing: knowing this is going to be about Marilyn, we expect certain things. Dazzling beauty exuding sex, insecure film star in search of the real person; perhaps some eye-popping excess about the business responsible for fabricating our dreams. And we expect these because Marilyn's story is Hollywood lore at its most pure: a pretty picture masking darkness of all sorts.

So because we already know that Marily was not just a sparkling movie star and because this is all so widely familiar and with its own widely referenced myth and iconography, the only reason to make this into a film is that you have come up with some unique angle that sheds new unexpected light into the thing. A structure that can hold together so many cinematic dreams implicit by having at the center this woman who gave flesh to them.

At least the premise is sound, if not remarkable. A young man has written a book about his short time together with her, and on a movie set. We trust that a lot of that is fictional and doctored, itself not far from a movie script. Ideally, our film has the option of conflating personal recollection, diary, rehearsal, film being made, into our film about the fabrication of myths and an actress looking to understand the real person behind the role she's given to play.

The first half holds. A breezy, sparkling, leisurely stroll around a movie set, as we like to imagine must have been everyday life around movie stars. We bask in the radiance of making movies and play-acting. What better life?

In the second half however we expect to know the other side of the idealized image. Sex as no longer delicious eye-candy but baring the soul naked.

What do we get instead? That same stereotyped image attached to a score of movie clichés: tabloid proclamations, banality, hackneyed emotion diffused into TV soap. We know that Marilyn and this world was more complex than this. Gentlemen preferred the blonde for a reason and the film does not even begin to understand why.

I just saw this film at the Mill Valley Film Festival and was pretty much blown away. My expectations were low and the very beginning of the film seemed to bear that out. Seeing well-known actors playing very well-known actors can take a little getting used to. But both Kenneth Branagh and Michelle Williams did admirable jobs. Michelle was a revelation. She completely inhabited the role of Marilyn in all of her complexity: her vulnerability, her guile, her sweetness, and her insecurity. This is one of the few performances I've seen where I would say someone is a lock for the Oscar. But this is not only a tour-de-force of acting. It is also a compelling and well-told story of the making of a film and of the competing personalities and agendas involved. Eddie Redmayne was wonderful as Colin, the narrator and main character of the story. Judi Dench was her wonderful, wise self. The cast was filled with wonderful character actors who seemed familiar and comfortable. My brother and I agreed that this was a better film than A King's Speech so on that basis alone it should win Best Picture. At the very least, it was an very entertaining and moving night at the movies.