My Week With Marilyn (15) 2011 (101 minutes)

She won a BAFTA for "The Prince and The Showgirl" (1957) and a Golden Globe for "Some Like It Hot" (1959). Barely three years later, the 36 year-old Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her home. Suicide or murder, we shall never be sure. In “My Week with Marilyn”, his directorial debut, Simon Curtis opens (yet another) window on this troubled and tortured soul.

Told through the eyes of not Marilyn but film hand, Colin Clark (Eddie, “The Other Boleyn Girl” Redmayne), the film recounts the story of how her BAFTA triumph was made. But overpowered by her new husband, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), overawed by her new Director, the finest actor of his generation, Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and overwhelmed by her new advisers - acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) and business partner Milton Greene (Dominic Cooper) – Marilyn falls apart, her self-confidence in ruins.

Branagh is terrific, in the role of his life, his physical likeness to Olivier almost too close for comfort. His emotional outbursts are a joy to behold from his hysteria at Marilyn’s tardiness to his resentment at her (lack of) skill, His grimaces of distaste will linger long in the memory. But if Branagh is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination, then Williams is a certainty for the ultimate prize, dominating the set as no other before her. Absent is the Marilyn of the pout and heaving breasts, the beguiler of a president and the sex symbol of her time. The Marilyn before us is an insecure child, lost and alone and desperate for love. Between the booze, the drugs the sex, she briefly sparkles like a fire but the stage is set and the path is fixed and her road to ruin decided. Redmayne does his best but for a man enchanted and in first love seems rather wooden and restrained. Cooper and Wanamaker go through the motions but only Judy Dench convinces, her turn as Dame Sybil Thorndike, gentle, touching and entirely convincing.

As for Clark himself, were his diaries - on which the movie is supposedly based - real, his thoughts imagined, his week with Marilyn invented? Perhaps. But if true what a week. Seven days of his life which he will never forget. Like Marilyn herself. Unforgettable.
Outstandingly constructed and executed. 10/10

RSM
November 2011

RSM
November 2011


Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn