My Week With Marilyn (Film Review)
Apr. 20th, 2012 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakOne of the films that make it to Germany with much delay, compared to the US and England, and an entry to the "film about the making of a film" genre which got two Oscar nominations, for Michelle Williams as best actress (playing Marilyn Monroe) and Kenneth Branagh as best supporting actor (playing Laurence Olivier). There is a certain irony in the fact that the film The Prince and the Showgirl (based on Terence Rattigan's play The Sleeping Prince), the shooting of which forms this movie's short plot, is something that was supposed to be enjoyable fluff and ended up being legendary for its disasters, starting with the spectacular non-chemistry between its leads (Monroe and Olivier), neither of whom would count it as anywhere near their best work, while My Week with Marilyn actually is enjoyable fluff (not pretending to be more), and the nominations for Williams and Branagh were richly deserved. The kid playing the "my" in "My Week With Marilyn", Colin Clark, isn't bad, either, but his role is mainly to look amazed at Marilyn, so that didn't take much effort. Also enjoying themselves in shorter or longer cameos and minor roles: Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh (loved her), Zoe Wannamaker as Paula Strasberg (somehow not making this in to a caricature despite what must have been sore temptation), Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike and Emma Watson, in one of the first post-Hermione outings, as the wardrobe girl Colin initially romances before setting his sights higher.
The factual basis, such as there is one, for this film are the two books the real Colin Clark squeezed out of his job as Third Director's Assistant during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl. Screen Colin is less calculating and more idealistic, but the film is nicely ambiguous about whether or not his view of Marilyn Monroe (as the innocent, misunderstood waif) is anywhere close to reality). When he utters the trailer's most cringeworthy line, "you could give this all up!" (meaning her career, because some days totally qualify him for knowing her better than anyone and offering marriage), he gets a pitying look in return, the observation that she loves "this" and the immediate end to the relationship. Mind you, the audience never gets to see Marilyn outside his pov (charming, neurotic, joyful, sexy, sometimes deeply lost and sometimes giving a glimpse of someone more calculating, as when she asks Colin whose side he's on), but the fact of the matter is that her jealous business partner Milton tells him eary on he'll get a week or ten days out of it and then she'll dump him and that's exactly what happens, which coupled with a conversation between husband Arthur Miller and Laurence Olivier in which Miller says she made him into this saviour figure which he simply can't be and the various Marylin-and-the-fans scenes gave me the impression that even within the strict limitation of the movie's world and without comparing this to reality, the appeal of Colin is simply the appeal of adoration through new eyes as an (only temporary) methadone for work-related depression. Were this a Marilyn Monroe biopicture I would say it's a shame that the Marilyn whom Olivier, who between loathing and admiring her gets most of the best lines about her, describes - "being an actress is hard, and she survived everything Hollywood threw at her" so "I wouldn't buy the little girl lost act if I were you" - does not an appearance, but it's not. It is what The Prince and the Showgirl was supposed to be and wasn't - a charming, witty fantasy with an undertone of melancholy. The film's Marilyn ends up as an enigma, a phantom of delight, insecurities and hinted at tragedies behind and in front of her, but ultimately not tangible.
As opposed to, interestingly enough, the film's Laurence Olivier. Kenneth Branagh doesn't look a bit like him (completely different facial structure, for starters), but of course there's a meta joke in the casting (due to the inevitable Olivier comparisons when young Ken shot his Henry V and had the Olivier/Vivien Leigh like theatrical power couple marriage with Emma Thompson), but the only reason why he doesn't walk away with the film is that Michelle Williams is so very good. Now Branagh's own career after early glory and then getting bashed left, right and center is now solidly in its admired character actor stage, and given what he did with other supporting parts, no matter whether they're serious (Reinhard Heydrich in Wannsee) or pure fluff (the hilarious Gilderoy Lockhart in the second Harry Potter film), it's not surprising he should be good in this one, but what did surprise me that the writing for Olivier, too, is more dimensional, because I went in completely expecting him to be the film's villain. And while his vanities certainly get skewered and Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike gets to call him a bully towards Marilyn, he's actually given a layered mix of motives throughout. At the most simple level, as the script once declares, he's a stage actor who wants to be a film star while Marilyn is the world's most famous film star who wants the prestige of working with the world's most famous stage actor, but the medium they're working in is film, and the camera loves her while it never loves him; then he's also heading towards middle age and hoping for rejuvination (and possibly a fling) via Marilyn and instead ends up feeling old and stuffy; her chronic production-holding lateness is deeply offensive to the disciplined professional in him; he loathes method acting (and can't see the point in a light comedy besides) and loathes having Paula Strasberg in what amounts to a second director role on his set even more; then there's his own marital crisis going on; and he's as trapped in what developes quickly in the project from hell as his leading lady is. As I said, he gets a great deal of the film's best lines, whether hostile, sarcastic, ironic or resignated and admiring, and script and Branagh even find a way of getting around what I imagined to be a great problem before seeing the film. Which is that while even today, you can count on the avarage movie viewer having some idea of who Marilyn Monroe was and why she was a screen idol (hands up if you haven't seen at least one film with Marilyn in it, and if not that, at least some clips), Olivier even in the films starring him that were popular in his day (say, Rebecca, and of course his Shakespeare on film versions) never had the same impact because what must have been an incredibly visceral presence that everyone who saw him on stage described in their reviews or memoirs never quite translated to the screen. (Least of all in The Prince and the Showgirl, where he's bland and wooden.) And in a film just claiming someone is a good act is deadly tell not show if not backed up, but you can't back it up with anything relating to the project in question. So what does My Week with Marilyn do? Near the end, when the film shooting is finally finished and Our Hero Colin has said goodbye to his fantasy of becoming Marilyn's next rescuer, he wanders to where a resigned Olivier is watching the rushes of a luminous, camera-loved Marilyn. And there Larry O. with some irony but also with sublime intonation quotes Prospero's we're such stuff as dreams are made off speech from The Tempest, and it's both Branagh and Olivier at their effortlessly Shakspearean best.
Lastly: bonus points for instead of letting Marilyn be the only interesting woman in the film filling all the other women with life and avoiding all "jealousy/catfight" clichés. Dame Sybil, played by Dame Judi, is maternal and gracious (and also delivering a verbal smack, as mentioned, to Olivier with her "are you a bully or a director?" question), Vivien Leigh is witty and seeing through her darling husband quite clearly, Not!Emma the wardrobe girl blames Colin, not Marilyn, for being thrown over as soon as he has a shot at the big star and afterwards refuses to be the consolation prize, and if Paula Strasberg's over the top praise to soothe Marilyn's insecurities ("you're the greatest actress the world has ever seen") first is eye role inducing we then see that she does genuinly care and simply says whatever it takes to get Marilyn through the next crisis. (Mind you, there are other takes you can have on the Strasberg-Monroe relationship, but just within the film's own cosmos, it's nice that there are no female caricatures.)
...and a footnote: early on when voiceover narrator Colin informs us he hails from an upper class family of overachievers and was always in his older brother's shadow, I was tempted to add "because he published his diaries first, got played by John Hurt in his film version and delivered such statements to the press as "I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers. I am a Nazi". Which tells you all about our family."
The factual basis, such as there is one, for this film are the two books the real Colin Clark squeezed out of his job as Third Director's Assistant during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl. Screen Colin is less calculating and more idealistic, but the film is nicely ambiguous about whether or not his view of Marilyn Monroe (as the innocent, misunderstood waif) is anywhere close to reality). When he utters the trailer's most cringeworthy line, "you could give this all up!" (meaning her career, because some days totally qualify him for knowing her better than anyone and offering marriage), he gets a pitying look in return, the observation that she loves "this" and the immediate end to the relationship. Mind you, the audience never gets to see Marilyn outside his pov (charming, neurotic, joyful, sexy, sometimes deeply lost and sometimes giving a glimpse of someone more calculating, as when she asks Colin whose side he's on), but the fact of the matter is that her jealous business partner Milton tells him eary on he'll get a week or ten days out of it and then she'll dump him and that's exactly what happens, which coupled with a conversation between husband Arthur Miller and Laurence Olivier in which Miller says she made him into this saviour figure which he simply can't be and the various Marylin-and-the-fans scenes gave me the impression that even within the strict limitation of the movie's world and without comparing this to reality, the appeal of Colin is simply the appeal of adoration through new eyes as an (only temporary) methadone for work-related depression. Were this a Marilyn Monroe biopicture I would say it's a shame that the Marilyn whom Olivier, who between loathing and admiring her gets most of the best lines about her, describes - "being an actress is hard, and she survived everything Hollywood threw at her" so "I wouldn't buy the little girl lost act if I were you" - does not an appearance, but it's not. It is what The Prince and the Showgirl was supposed to be and wasn't - a charming, witty fantasy with an undertone of melancholy. The film's Marilyn ends up as an enigma, a phantom of delight, insecurities and hinted at tragedies behind and in front of her, but ultimately not tangible.
As opposed to, interestingly enough, the film's Laurence Olivier. Kenneth Branagh doesn't look a bit like him (completely different facial structure, for starters), but of course there's a meta joke in the casting (due to the inevitable Olivier comparisons when young Ken shot his Henry V and had the Olivier/Vivien Leigh like theatrical power couple marriage with Emma Thompson), but the only reason why he doesn't walk away with the film is that Michelle Williams is so very good. Now Branagh's own career after early glory and then getting bashed left, right and center is now solidly in its admired character actor stage, and given what he did with other supporting parts, no matter whether they're serious (Reinhard Heydrich in Wannsee) or pure fluff (the hilarious Gilderoy Lockhart in the second Harry Potter film), it's not surprising he should be good in this one, but what did surprise me that the writing for Olivier, too, is more dimensional, because I went in completely expecting him to be the film's villain. And while his vanities certainly get skewered and Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike gets to call him a bully towards Marilyn, he's actually given a layered mix of motives throughout. At the most simple level, as the script once declares, he's a stage actor who wants to be a film star while Marilyn is the world's most famous film star who wants the prestige of working with the world's most famous stage actor, but the medium they're working in is film, and the camera loves her while it never loves him; then he's also heading towards middle age and hoping for rejuvination (and possibly a fling) via Marilyn and instead ends up feeling old and stuffy; her chronic production-holding lateness is deeply offensive to the disciplined professional in him; he loathes method acting (and can't see the point in a light comedy besides) and loathes having Paula Strasberg in what amounts to a second director role on his set even more; then there's his own marital crisis going on; and he's as trapped in what developes quickly in the project from hell as his leading lady is. As I said, he gets a great deal of the film's best lines, whether hostile, sarcastic, ironic or resignated and admiring, and script and Branagh even find a way of getting around what I imagined to be a great problem before seeing the film. Which is that while even today, you can count on the avarage movie viewer having some idea of who Marilyn Monroe was and why she was a screen idol (hands up if you haven't seen at least one film with Marilyn in it, and if not that, at least some clips), Olivier even in the films starring him that were popular in his day (say, Rebecca, and of course his Shakespeare on film versions) never had the same impact because what must have been an incredibly visceral presence that everyone who saw him on stage described in their reviews or memoirs never quite translated to the screen. (Least of all in The Prince and the Showgirl, where he's bland and wooden.) And in a film just claiming someone is a good act is deadly tell not show if not backed up, but you can't back it up with anything relating to the project in question. So what does My Week with Marilyn do? Near the end, when the film shooting is finally finished and Our Hero Colin has said goodbye to his fantasy of becoming Marilyn's next rescuer, he wanders to where a resigned Olivier is watching the rushes of a luminous, camera-loved Marilyn. And there Larry O. with some irony but also with sublime intonation quotes Prospero's we're such stuff as dreams are made off speech from The Tempest, and it's both Branagh and Olivier at their effortlessly Shakspearean best.
Lastly: bonus points for instead of letting Marilyn be the only interesting woman in the film filling all the other women with life and avoiding all "jealousy/catfight" clichés. Dame Sybil, played by Dame Judi, is maternal and gracious (and also delivering a verbal smack, as mentioned, to Olivier with her "are you a bully or a director?" question), Vivien Leigh is witty and seeing through her darling husband quite clearly, Not!Emma the wardrobe girl blames Colin, not Marilyn, for being thrown over as soon as he has a shot at the big star and afterwards refuses to be the consolation prize, and if Paula Strasberg's over the top praise to soothe Marilyn's insecurities ("you're the greatest actress the world has ever seen") first is eye role inducing we then see that she does genuinly care and simply says whatever it takes to get Marilyn through the next crisis. (Mind you, there are other takes you can have on the Strasberg-Monroe relationship, but just within the film's own cosmos, it's nice that there are no female caricatures.)
...and a footnote: early on when voiceover narrator Colin informs us he hails from an upper class family of overachievers and was always in his older brother's shadow, I was tempted to add "because he published his diaries first, got played by John Hurt in his film version and delivered such statements to the press as "I am not a fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers. I am a Nazi". Which tells you all about our family."
