Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
My Week With Marilyn (2011) FM
In 2011’s My Week With Marilyn, Simon Curtis’ adaptation of Colin Clark’s 1995 memoir The Prince, The Showgirl and Me, Michelle Williams’ Marilyn Monroe is the incandescent, life-giving sun around which everything revolves. Williams plays the legendarily troubled actress as a tragic figure who stumbles through life in a bleary, chaotic haze and breaks hearts as reflexively as others breathe.
Eddie Redmayne plays the twenty-three-year-old Colin Clark, a bright, ambitious young man of means connected enough to land his first real job as a third assistant director for Laurence Olivier on 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl, which the great English ham directed as well as starred in.
Third assistant director is a fancy title for a gofer. It’s a position that nevertheless comes with nifty perks like working with an actor many consider the greatest of all time and, in Marilyn Monroe, cinema’s supreme sex goddess.
Though newly married to a surprisingly hunky Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), Monroe takes a liking to the eager young novice. They develop a cozy working relationship that quickly blossoms into friendship and then, briefly, something more.
My Week with Marilyn avoids the clumsy, clattering cliches of biopics by focusing on a specific period in its subject’s life rather than trying to capture the drama and messiness of real life in 90 overstuffed minutes.
The dramedy starts breezy and superficial but gets more melancholy and poignant when Monroe’s deep, penetrating sadness rises to the surface. Emma Watson is wasted in the perversely thankless role of Lucy Armstrong, a young woman who is attractive and desirable but cannot measure up, in Clark’s mind, with the most attractive and desirable woman in the world. If Watson is short-changed by a nothing role better left on the cutting room floor, Williams is heartbreaking and achingly human in a masterful, Oscar-nominated performance at once nuanced and bold.
