My Week With Marilyn (2011)
Biopics are a hard genre to nail. Try to squeeze too much in, and you risk thinning out the story of whatever cultural icon you’re attempting to recreate. Far better, surely, to focus on a single moment in history, an approach that worked well for films such as Elizabeth and Hilary and Jackie, both of which achieved potency through their approach to very specific moments in their subject’s respective histories. My Week with Marilyn takes a similar approach, using Colin Clark’s memoir about his time spent with Monroe on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, as its foundation. What emerges is less a glimpse into the life of a troubled movie star, and more a middling, sometimes laughably camp, often stultifying and dull, Sunday night TV drama.
Eddie Redmayne plays Colin, a posh, terribly nice young man with a voice-over almost as earnest as the film itself in its reverence for a vanished era. Handed a job as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl, he describes himself as more of a “gofer,” a lackey of sorts to Kenneth Branagh’s preening Laurence Olivier. Aside from a rather limp romance with Emma Watson’s surplus-to-requirements costume girl, Colin’s gaze rests firmly on Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). Newly married to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), Marilyn is luminous on screen when she gets it right, but crippled by self-doubt and paranoia about those around her. There is some light banter in the early innings about Olivier’s well-known abhorrence for Method acting, as Marilyn scuttles back and forth between the set and her eccentric, maternal acting coach (Zoe Wanamaker). But much of the film rests on the relationship between Hollywood’s biggest star, and “nobody” Colin Clark. Leaning rather precariously on a trembling-lipped, chaste nights together, and an outing – with bonus skinny-dipping! – to Windsor Castle, My Week with Marilyn is significantly less than the sum of its parts.
The film makes gestures towards some interesting themes and ideas – the ease with which we fall in love with ideals over reality, the relationship between British cinema and Hollywood glamour – but seems unwilling to follow any of them through. More damagingly, Adrian Hodges’ script struggles to add any meat to the loud bust-ups between its two stars, or, in fact, to any of his supporting characters. Only Judi Dench, as an imperious, but sympathetic, Sybil Thorndike, makes any impression, with the rest of the star-heavy cast left flapping in the wind. One thing endures: Williams’ performance. Steering clear of caricature – although her impersonation of Monroe is spot-on, in spite of an unconvincing body suit – she mines a deep well of unhappiness and self-loathing, even, and most impressively, in her lighter moments, where her inner misery seems to be overtaken by an infectious joy at “playing” Marilyn. It’s an internal struggle that the film never really sees fit to address, aside from a few throwaway lines about Monroe’s unhappy childhood, and Olivier’s assertion that underneath it all, she must be “profoundly sad.” It is therefore up to Williams alone to demonstrate the complexity of both the myth of Monroe, and the woman behind the camera, and it’s already a performance that has won her numerous accolades. But it’s mired in a film whose mediocrity threatens to overwhelm such a finely-tuned turn, one that fails to understand either the key pleasures of hagiography, or to possess the requisite intelligence to work as anything more than a rather drab piece of circumspection.
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