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My Week with Marilyn

Presented by The Colonial Theatre at The Colonial Theatre

December 23, 2011-January 5, 2012

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“In My Week with Marilyn, Michele Williams makes the star come alive. She has Monroe’s walk, the easy, swivelling neck, the face that responds to everything like a flower swaying in the breeze. Most important, she has the sexual sweetness and the hurt, lost look that shifts, in a flash, into resistance and tears.

This charming and touching Anglo-American production, written by Adrian Hodges, and directed by Simon Curtis, is based on two memoirs by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young man with good connections who, in 1956, became Laurence Olivier’s assistant, when Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) was directing and acting in a film version of a Terence Rattigan stage farce. The Prince and the Showgirl, the movie was called—a Ruritanian romance now largely forgotten, in which Olivier, with a thick Eastern European accent and a monocle, falls in love with an untutored entertainer played by Monroe. Among other things, Marilyn is an amused and amusing exposition of the struggle between two ways of life: the tough professionalism of British theatre veterans (be on time, know your lines, and just pretend) and the Method style favored by Americans, in which emotions are derived from some trauma or pleasure in the actor’s life. Paula Strasberg—the wife of Lee, and Monroe’s New York acting guru—accompanies Marilyn to London, and she’s always on the set, talking into her ear (“Think about the things you like. . . . Frank Sinatra. Coca-Cola”) and getting in Olivier’s way. Branagh has become jowly in middle age, but his looks are passably close to Olivier’s, and he has mastered Olivier’s elegantly phrased, caressing graciousness and his indignant bellow. Everything about Monroe exasperates Olivier. Though he knows that she is not an actress in the normal sense, he envies her intimacy with the camera, and he wants to show her off. But she’s hopeless: she turns up on the set hours late, blows her lines, and hears only what she wants to hear. She’s so alert to any possible rebuff that she can hardly take direction at all.

Monroe, lost, needs a pal, and young Colin, abashed yet persistent, keeps showing up in her dressing room. Eventually, they go off on a chauffeured romp in the countryside. Eddie Redmayne has a virginal look, and a knocked-silly amazement when the most famous woman in the world shucks her clothes in front of him and jumps into a freezing river. Imagine skinny-dipping with Marilyn Monroe! Monroe plays with him, gains his allegiance, but then falls apart, and he tries, like many people before and after, to take care of her. The filmmakers’ touch is a little demure: Monroe could be tough and nasty as well as gentle, and we don’t see that side of her. My Week with Marilyn essentially preserves the point of view of an astonished boy. It’s an expertly made, intentionally minor movie, though when Monroe, doping herself with everything available, lies in bed, confused and hapless, there are depressing intimations of the end to come.” (David Denby, The New Yorker)

Directed by Simon Curtis. UK. 2011. R. 99 min. Weinstein. 35mm.