12-29-11 Movie Review: My Week with Marilyn

My Week With Marilyn claims to be a true story, but question has been raised about that. The basic facts of difficulties during the production of the movie The Prince and the Showgirl are accepted as accurate as far as they go, and Michelle Williams’ performance as Marilyn Monroe is generally praised. But while she looks great in the white gown and has the voice and the movements right, Williams’ face is not like Monroe’s, and the strange charisma that was so essential to Monroe is not there.

And Monroe was such an incredible creature that the story of her career is all but impossible to believe, even with annotations, which the movie lacks. The viewer will wonder how The Prince and the Showgirl got made at all, under the conditions shown – and the conditions are, if anything underplayed.


[Wichita show times]

Kenneth Branagh is acceptable as Laurence Olivier, partly because Olivier’s charisma is not as important to his story as Monroe’s was to hers, but I suspect that his impatience with Monroe is exaggerated. The problem was that Olivier was a classically trained actor and Monroe was a method actress almost entirely dependent on her own acting coach, and neither the methods of rehearsal nor the methods of performance were the same; in The Prince and the Showgirl, Olivier does not come off very well. One of his lines in My Week With Marilyn is gentle in this respect, presenting Monroe as a helpless victim of psychological weaknesses, incapable of guile, almost a child in a body she could not control.

This may or may not be how she was, but it makes for a fascinating performance by Michelle Williams.