Butler's Cinema Scene

Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe

“MY WEEK WITH MARILYN” My rating: B- 

99 minutes | MPAA rating: R

An actress portraying Marilyn Monroe faces the same daunting obstacles as an actor playing Jesus.

No matter how good your performance, it pales in comparison to the real thing.

Michelle Williams, one of our finest young actresses, does a perfectly credible job as the  immortal blonde sex symbol in “My Week with Marilyn,” a melodrama unfolding during the filming of “The Prince and the Showgirl” in London in 1957.

But as good as Williams is, not once did I mistake her for Marilyn. It’s a passable impersonation, but no one will ever fill the screen the way Monroe did.

Simon Curtis’ feature directing debut  (after a long career in television)  is based on “The Prince, The Showgirl and Me” and “My Week with Marilyn,” Colin Clark’s memoirs about his experiences as a young production assistant on the film.

Kenneth Branagh as Laurence Olivier

When we first meet Colin (Eddie Redmayne), he’s a directionless young fellow — well educated, well to do and pretty much lost.

But Colin has an artistic bent and decides to virtually camp out in out in the lobby of Sir Laurence Olivier’s production offices until he gets noticed. His minor-keyed obnoxiousness works…Sir Laurence (Kenneth Branagh) takes him on as a lowly gofer.

All of Great Britain is abuzz with the arrival of Marilyn (Williams) and her new husband, playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott).

But the thrill soon wears off when it becomes all too obvious that the starlet is a mess who keeps her coworkers waiting for hours while her acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) tries to talk her down from the emotional ledge on which she is perpetually perched.

For Olivier — who regards acting as something you do, not something you obsess about — this is the height of unprofessional behavior.

When Miller returns to the States (he needs a vacation from his new spouse), a needy Marilyn turns to young Colin to be her sounding board, confidant and shoulder to cry on.

Though presumably based on fact, Clark’s story conveniently embraces all the cliches of the genre. Among them is the costume girl (a post-“Harry Potter” Emma Watson) whom Colin betrays as soon as Marilyn crooks a finger in his direction.

“My Week” is crammed with tasty little performances from Julia Ormand (as Olivier’s in-decline wife, Viven Leigh), Michael Kitchen, Toby Jones, Dominic Cooper, Jim Carter, Derek Jacobi and especially Judi Dench (as veteran actress Sybil Thorndike, who recognizes in Marilyn an on-screen truthfulness that not all the acting classes on Earth can duplicate).

Redmayne’s Colin is less a compelling character than an observer. Which unfortunately leaves the film with a vacant spot smack dab in the middle.

Whatever success the film enjoys can be credited to Williams, whose Marilyn is seductive, maddening and pathetically sad, a child-woman whose emotional neediness is nearly as awesome as her figure.

There are moments when — in the right light and especially in a couple of musical/dance numbers — Williams does look uncannily like Marilyn. But they don’t come often enough.

What’s really disappointing here is the film’s tonal mishmash. There are moments when Branagh seems to be going for comedy in expressing Olivier’s frustration with his leading lady, but director Curtis doesn’t know what to do with it. He fails to either integrate or effectively contrast these moments with the essential tragedy of Marilyn’s condition. Is this supposed to be a study of a woman with crippling emotional baggage? Or a lightweight stage door comedy?

“My Week with Marilyn” neither makes a choice nor successfully balances those two extremes.

The result offers some modest entertainment, and a whole lot of  superficiality.

| Robert W. Butler