The release of My Week With Marilyn combines two of Hollywood's most familiar genres: the coming-of-age tale, and the Hollywood Babylon exploitation.In it, a young man (the delicious Eddie Redmayne) encounters the silver screen's most enduring icon, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and, through his heartbreak of learning the truth behind the pristine image, comes to understand life a lot better than he did before.It's basically Summer Of '42 on a film set, but cineastes shouldn't miss the opportunity to indulge in the delight of seeing all shades of the Marilyn you've heard so much about, from the fragile vulnerability through the voracious appetite for attention and the monstrous ego, depicted with accuracy if not verisimilitude. Williams gives a rich, densely layered performance as the screen goddess, but doesn't quite nail her physically: the chunky thighs and perfect skin do well, and Williams is very beautiful, but Marilyn had a desperate look in her eye that was as provocative as it was vulnerable, and Williams, with her calm gaze and steady demeanor, can never achieve that state of brittleness despite a valiant effort.
The film had me ruminating on Marilyn's film oeuvre, which I haven't given consideration to in a long time.Simon Curtis' film concerns the making of The Prince And The Showgirl, which truly was one of the most delightful performances she ever gave; her winsome charm against Olivier's stodgy, stiff-backed leading man melts the screen every time she appears and her hilarious scene responding to Dame Sybil Thorndike's French conversation is a riot.It was in the mid-to-late 50s period of her career that Marilyn's timing improved and her performances grew richer: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1952 shows her at her most appealing, and was the film that solidified her “dumb blonde” persona, but it's nothing compared to the gleeful delight with which she pounds the piano keys in 1955's The Seven Year Itch (the film that also provided filmdom with the most memorable image of her, standing above a subway grate while her dress billows around her). She took off from Hollywood to study with Strasberg in New York for a stint, and the performance that followed, in Joshua Logan's 1956 Bus Stop, shows the interference: instead of snapping back at her co-stars with her usual aplomb, she ingests all her lines and rubs her face for two hours, an aggravating performance that at the time was heralded as a new height for her but nowadays seems cloying and mannered (as does much of the early days of the Method).Where she really shone was in her second pairing with Billy Wilder (after Itch), the classic comedy Some Like It Hot co-starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.By all accounts, by this time her substance-reliance made her a nightmare to work with (Wilder parodied her with a grating blond type in his follow-up film, the Oscar-winning The Apartment), and she had trouble remembering the simplest lines (the TV movie Norma Jean and Marilyn, which is the best film about stardom ever made, shows her reading her lines off the furniture), but somehow on screen she veritably shines with instinct and timing. It also provided her with the closest thing to trophy legitimacy, garnering her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress of 1959.The film's qualities have been overrated by reviewers: it's delightful but not nearly as brilliant as unimaginative scholars would have you think it is, but for star quality you can barely do better.It was sadly to be her last hurrah: Let's Make Love with Yves Montand fizzled, a throwback to dull musical comedies she'd made in the mid-50s like There's No Business Like Show Business, and her final completed film The Misfits only has resonance in the years since she died, in 1962, at the age of 36.
My Week With Marilyn by Simon Curtis is currently playing in theatres.The majority of Monroe's film appearances are available on DVD and/or Blu-Ray.
Eddie Redmayne) encounters the silver screen's most enduring icon, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) and, through his heartbreak of learning the truth behind the pristine image, comes to understand life a lot better than he did before.It's basically Summer Of '42 on a film set, but cineastes shouldn't miss the opportunity to indulge in the delight of seeing all shades of the Marilyn you've heard so much about, from the fragile vulnerability through the voracious appetite for attention and the monstrous ego, depicted with accuracy if not verisimilitude. Williams gives a rich, densely layered performance as the screen goddess, but doesn't quite nail her physically: the chunky thighs and perfect skin do well, and Williams is very beautiful, but Marilyn had a desperate look in her eye that was as provocative as it was vulnerable, and Williams, with her calm gaze and steady demeanor, can never achieve that state of brittleness despite a valiant effort. 
She took off from Hollywood to study with Strasberg in New York for a stint, and the performance that followed, in Joshua Logan's 1956 Bus Stop, shows the interference: instead of snapping back at her co-stars with her usual aplomb, she ingests all her lines and rubs her face for two hours, an aggravating performance that at the time was heralded as a new height for her but nowadays seems cloying and mannered (as does much of the early days of the Method).Where she really shone was in her second pairing with Billy Wilder (after Itch), the classic comedy Some Like It Hot co-starring Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.By all accounts, by this time her substance-reliance made her a nightmare to work with (Wilder parodied her with a grating blond type in his follow-up film, the Oscar-winning The Apartment), and she had trouble remembering the simplest lines (the TV movie Norma Jean and Marilyn, which is the best film about stardom ever made, shows her reading her lines off the furniture), but somehow on screen she veritably shines with instinct and timing. It also provided her with the closest thing to trophy legitimacy, garnering her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress of 1959.The film's qualities have been overrated by reviewers: it's delightful but not nearly as brilliant as unimaginative scholars would have you think it is, but for star quality you can barely do better.It was sadly to be her last hurrah: Let's Make Love with Yves Montand fizzled, a throwback to dull musical comedies she'd made in the mid-50s like There's No Business Like Show Business, and her final completed film The Misfits only has resonance in the years since she died, in 1962, at the age of 36.