Movie Review: My Week with Marilyn

My Week with Marilyn is a dutifully constructed and well acted piece of Oscar bait placed on the biggest hook possible, the memory of Hollywood iconMarilyn Monroe. While the film itself is an excessively lightweight piece of fluff that only barely courts the dark side of the larger than life personality at the centre of the story, the performances and casting are first rate and veteran television director Simon Curtis does a fine job recreating both a sense of old Hollywood and British acting royalty. It’s far from one of the best films of the year, but it’s not a misfire by any stretch.

Using the memoirs of documentarian Colin Clark as a jumping off point, the film follows young Colin (Eddie Redmayne) as he hounds Sir Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) into giving him a job on the set of his next film. Liking what he sees in the young man, Olivier gives Colin the job of being the third assistant director on the set of his new light comedy (eventually to be retitled The Prince and The Showgirl), which is set to co-star Marilyn (Michelle Williams), who was then just becoming a worldwide megastar.

Colin soon finds himself as the only person seemingly able to get Monroe to the set at all, as the famed actress brings a lot of emotional baggage to the set. Her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) is floundering. She needs her method acting coach (Zoe Wanamaker) with her at all times because she has little to no self confidence in her own abilities. Her agent (Toby Jones) seems to only care about the money and her publicist (Dominic Cooper) just wants to keep her doped up and complacent while keeping others as far away from her as possible. Despite already kinda-sorta dating the film’s costumer (Emma Watson), Colin makes a bond with the starlet that makes everyone on the production equally envious and uneasy.

Curtis doesn’t try to push the audience’s emotional buttons very hard, coasting by on his stacked cast of acting talent and opulent production design, leading the film to feel almost mechanical in its desire to court awards voters. The loving recreation of 1950s era Pinewood studios in London and the depiction of actually working on set with Monroe are the strongest technical merits of the film that don’t come across as the filmmakers showing off. The same can’t be said for an overbearing score and somewhat pointless cameos from British acting royalty portraying, well, British acting royalty as Judy Dench and Derek Jacobi show up as Sybil Thorndike and Owen Moorshead, respectively. Redmayne and Branagh more than hold their own, but the normally engaging Cooper is wasted in a thankless role that mostly amounts to Curtis focusing on his character furrowing his brow and glowering in displeasure.

Williams does do a pretty great job as Monroe, though. Wisely not going for a full on impersonation of her, Williams allows a bit of herself and a bit of humanity to shine through. She isn’t necessarily trying to ape Marilyn note for note in scenes where the character needs to let her guard down and act like a scared little girl thrust into the maelstrom of stardom, but Williams does understand that at times Marilyn had to give the audience exactly what was expected by her public. Williams floats between the two extremes quite gracefully, functioning as the only thing in the film that fully lives up to the hype surrounding it.

Sadly, even when Williams brings on the darker nature of Marilyn’s character, Curtis reduces the material so greatly that the action might as well be taking place in the clouds rather than on Earth. It’s an escapist film disguised as somewhat pretentious awards bait. My Week with Marilyn isn’t necessarily about conveying hard truths, but it does make for a decent weekend matinee that the woman the film is build around would most likely approve of.

Rating:  

Rated 14A
Cast: Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Dougray Scott
Directed by: Simon Curtis

Top image: A scene from My Week with Marilyn. Courtesy Alliance Films.