Having been born a touch shy of two decades after the death of Marilyn Monroe, I have only her filmography and Google images to comprehend her beauty and globalizing appeal that radiates from pouting lips, sultry lilting voice, bedroom eyes, and a smile that – despite its documented manufacturing – could make the youngest cynic and oldest curmudgeon blush. Despite the mythologized turmoil pre and post Hollywood, Monroe injects energy into a nerve often untouched by many of today’s stars. It can’t be her anachronistic mystique, so it must just be the way that each and every pose she struck convinces us of a reality – no matter how illusory, and, in a sense, that resides at the heart of My Week With Marilyn.
On the one hand, My Week With Marilyn does what a solid biopic should: emphasize a glimpse in the life of a celebrated figure that humanizes them with dreams and faults, highs and lows, what we perceive and what they live. This assessment derives from the observation that many biopics succumb to the route of narrative abundance. Ray and A Beautiful Mind stand out in recent memory, as do Ali, Pollack, Blow, Milk, or The Blind Side. Some films garnered Oscars and critical acclaim, but the stories themselves were replete with unnecessarily fabricated moments for the sake of constructing an intriguing life story rather than a singular focus.
On the other hand, the film, in its appropriate brevity, tries to cram too many thematic analogies and political references – and when done, it’s not on the sly. For every charismatic turn by the remarkable Michelle Williams, there is a sledgehammer two inches above the audience if perchance the allegory between unions and the acting community wasn’t clear the first time around, or just in case the audience forgets that Marilyn has been married three times and “breaks hearts” over and over again. Most of all, we are often reminded that Monroe is a “cash cow” kept “doped up” in the nefariousness of show business and “has taken everything Hollywood has thrown at her.”
There is also an intriguing facet to this cramming that could have been rather poignant if it weren’t for the repetition: the duplicitous nature of all of those in Hollywood. And, I don’t mean this is a cynical, “nothing is as it seems” way, but rather, an assertion that to live the life means to lead another life, creating a balancing act between the public visage and the private person. Monroe is the clearest example of this dichotomy, and her fate attests to its rigorous demands; however, Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) is also subtly shown as a façade, particularly when his assistant directors and confidants refer to him as “Larry.” It seems that he would not be lauded as one of the best actors in history had his marquees displayed the more assonant “Larry Olivier.”
In the same vein, the rise of Monroe limns the apparent decline of Olivier, who in 1956 was a veteran of the stage and screen and represented a dwindling breed of classical actors being overshadowed by the newly introduced practitioners of Stanislavsky method acting – though he did go on to have a fine career after their joint venture in The Prince and the Showgirl – something that is apparent as Olivier’s production company basically hinges on the inclusion of Monroe in the next film. Without her, there is no film, and this says something about the power that she brought to the screen – regardless of whether she was a product created for the masses or a genius marketer of self. As Olivier notes in the film, “When Marilyn gets it right, you just don’t want to look at anyone else.”
A similar sentiment can be adapted to My Week With Marilyn, in which the focus of the film, and rightly so, is Michelle Williams as Marilyn. Nature didn’t bless Williams with Monroe’s “splendid posterior” or hourglass hips; however, Williams’ mannerisms and voice that undulates from the charming lilt to the endearingly earnest channels the complexity of Monroe – or, at least, the mythology we’ve been privy to. The most heart-wrenchingly devastating moments may reside in the seamless slips between icon and human that remind us of the imminent history that befell Monroe.
Williams saves the film, but, overall, it could have done without the oft-referenced “truth.” Such a subjective topic is tricky to tackle and becomes rather tiring when it’s trying to be made obviously tricky. This is not to say that “truth” is off limits, but its presence as a theme is transparent and lacks cinematic cleverness. It’s clear that Marilyn “is a handful” and “pops pills to go to sleep” and “pops pills to stay awake.” It’s doubly obvious that the studio is feeding her these various prescriptions of sodium amytal, particularly when the second director notes that he “didn’t count” how many he gave her. Here, the man is vilified for the sake of vilification, but he’s merely the final reminder of many in a ninety-nine minute movie of how doped up Monroe was at the apex of her career and the agents of her sedation. The issue here isn’t that the drug culture is explored – or even that Hollywood is continuously demonized. The issue is more the exposition overkill. Montages work. Show don’t tell. Screenwriting 101. Williams’ portrayal of Monroe in her various drug-addled, anxious, paranoid, manic states conveys the same narrative without underestimating the audience’s intelligence.
In the end, the film works because of Williams, but is slowed because of what it tries to create in the orbit around her. Ironically, My Week With Marilyn is, itself, a metaphysical study of truth that begs the audience to wonder how genuine and accurate a film could be that is based on a memoir – something a bit precariously reliable in recent history – that has been adapted to the screen, and begins with an assertion that “This is their true story.” The questionable word here is “their.” To Colin Clark’s credit, his novel, The Prince, The Showgirl, and Me, from which My Week With Marilyn is adapted, received reader and critical acclaim when published, but this doesn’t necessarily prove the tale within infallible. In essence, it is rather tricky to declare any movie based on someone’s sole perception “their” story, which indubitably leaves us to wonder whether or not the re-imagined reimagining of their week is in fact “truth” or “artificial crap.”
