My Week With Marilyn
DIRECTED BY SIMON CURTIS
There are many qualities that make Michelle Williams a reliably compelling screen presence, but effortless sex appeal isn’t generally her stock in trade. That, of course, isn’t to suggest that Williams is unattractive or that she’s incapable of being alluring (both are plainly untrue), but the fact remains: no amount of makeup and padding can credibly transform Williams into the iconic, voluptuous, seemingly involuntarily magnetic Marilyn Monroe. For a film that has little to offer beyond Williams’ bid to embody the mid-century megastar, this is a major obstacle.
Unsurprisingly, where Williams fares better is in capturing the fragility behind the actor’s sexpot façade and in evoking the abundant insecurities that fostered her predilection for self-annihilation. But Williams’ performance remains only half-convincing, and even the believable bits serve a total non-story.
More accurately titled The Week During Which I Naively Hoped that I Might Hook Up with Marilyn, Simon Curtis’ film draws on two autobiographical accounts by Colin Clark, who, through a nepotistic link to Laurence Olivier, landed a gig as a gofer on the actor-director’s 1957 feature The Prince and the Showgirl. As played, perfunctorily, by Eddie Redmayne, Clark becomes the production-within-a-production’s Marilyn-wrangler, tasked with minding the actor after her diva-ish disdain for punctuality and preference for Method acting see her fall out with the churlish, classically trained Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).
For her part, Williams’ Monroe is drawn to the 23-year-old Clark precisely because he’s such an unthreatening, unconditionally supportive presence at a time when she finds herself at odds with a pair of overbearing older men (Olivier and her husband Arthur Miller, played by Dougray Scott, who hastily departs the picture to make way for Clark and Monroe’s tepid “tryst”). She entreats him to show her some local sights, so they visit Windsor Castle and go for a spontaneous dip in a secluded stretch of the Thames, and later even cuddle, and while this was no doubt absolutely thrilling for the real-life Clark, as a vicarious experience it’s dramatically inert.
Unable to communicate Monroe’s irresistibly enchanting qualities—save through frequent shots of others’ starstruck reactions to her—the film amounts to a shallow, partial portrait of a vaguely tragic young woman, and though Williams’ performance is expectedly game, one senses, at least on the basis of Adrian Hodges’ screenplay, that Clark may not have known Marilyn quite as well as he’d have us believe.