“It’s agony because he’s a great actor who wants to be a film star, and you’re a film star who wants to be a great actress.”
When I was younger I used to always been stuck on HBO waiting for the latest “Making Of” 30 minute episodes that used to play frequently for the latest releases in cinemas. To this day I tend to take the time to watch the, sometimes as long as two hour, making of featurettes that studios place on the DVDs I purchase constantly. It’s hard to come away from My Week With Marilyn without asking one of two crucial things: Was this a really interesting film about one of the most sought after “it” girls of the last century? or was it just an unremarkable “making of” film of how Lawrence Olivier suffered attempting to direct a film starring said “it” girl?
My biggest issue with the film, while its main plot isn’t to do this, is that at the end of the day it barely says anything that truly gives us that much insight into who Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) was, unless you have a lot of the facts of her life already embedded in your memory. At first we are introduced to her as the promoted version of her and slowly we see that image of the typical Monroe character peel away piece by piece as the film moves on but at the same time that character is still there for us to see.
John Ford once said that 90% of directing is casting. This film leads me to ponder on the difference of what a movie star is and what a character actor is. Marilyn Monroe was a star, just like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston and Julia Roberts are. No matter how well a performance they deliver they manage to exude something that’s intangible that no true performer can mimic. That is what we truly wanted to capture in this film; the intangible. Did Simon Curtis manage to capture that intangible in a way that we could at the very least see the concept of it?
Through the contrast of the struggle for Monroe to want to rise up to a level that Sir Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and the rest of her case, including Judi Dench, exudes we can never truly tell if Monroe is truly this ditsy dame from America or truly a genius in disguise. But isn’t that the point of cinema? They give us this version of a person that we get to fall in love with and go on adventures with every week at the cinema and we know that is our constant. The thing that ruins that is when one day we run into them on the street and are broken hearted that who we see on screen isn’t the person that’s in front of us in the real world. I know it’s an unfair request to ask of anyone, but at the same time it’s the ultimate product that is always desired by those Hollywood studios and attempted to be marketed as such.
I think I struggle so much trying to figure out whether I think this is a brilliantly subtle character study that doesn’t paint its subject in any form of a biased light or a fairly undetermined approach to a story that didn’t come with enough content other than the idealized celebrity that the film being made within the film comes along with the package is that I went in wanting the former but got a bit too much of the later. I wanted a film which told me why Marilyn was so great at what she did so well, but rather the film was truly this weird romance between the greatest Hollywood stars of the time and a youngster getting his first ever job as a low rung assistant in the film industry. The romance itself was without scandal and I believe would be as uninteresting as the latest Katherine Heigl film if it weren’t for the fact that it was with Marilyn Monroe herself.