The saddest part of watching My Week with Marilyn is that you can catch glimpses of a smile-inducing, breezy comedy throughout. Unfortunately, the film is saddled with both dubious source material — in this case, the memoirs of third assistant director Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne, The Miraculous Year) — and unfair expectations as a weighty, Oscar-baity witty drama in the vein of The King’s Speech.
As a result, director Simon Curtis’ debut feature film is, at once, both ridiculously vapid and overbearingly stuffy. The central conflict in the movie is whether or not young Clark should engage in fornication with Lucy (Emma Watson, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) or chase after the infamous Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams, Take This Waltz).
It also doesn’t help that Redmayne has a supremely punchable face and appears to be only capable of smiling smugly and vacuously in his performance as the young Clark.
Frustratingly, Curtis (perhaps shackled by the source material) spends an almost perverse amount of attention on the uninteresting and rather creepy Clark instead of the other, much more interesting characters occupying the story.
My Week details the troubled production of Laurence Olivier’s (Kenneth Branagh, Pirate Radio) The Prince and the Showgirl. In particular, the story is framed around the very young and very naïve Clark, a chap with aspirations as a director who landed his gig as third assistant director via family connections.
By nature, the story doesn’t really go anywhere: Monroe arrives on the British set, Olivier argues with her, the film gets made and everyone buggers off home. So, clearly, there’s great potential for either an amusing behind-the-scenes look at a classic film inhabited by richly, if somewhat broadly, rendered performances, or a well-articulated drama about the pain and sacrifice needed to make a great work of art.
The film, to its detriment, tries to have it both ways. Curtis spends time both examining Monroe’s damaged psyche to embarrassingly shallow effect (again, probably because of Clark’s memoirs) while straining to maintain a level of grace and wittiness throughout.
Curtis unequivocally fails at the former goal, but could have found success in bringing to life a charming film about filmmaking. Curtis’ film boasts handsome production values and a great score.
His supporting actors, especially Williams, Branagh and Judi Dench as actress Sybil Thorndike (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) all give fantastic and delightful performances. Williams, in particular, manages to embody Monroe to such a degree of verisimilitude that an Oscar nomination is almost guaranteed.
If Curtis had simply occupied the film with just these characters and used Clark as the audience’s surrogate, My Week could have been good. As it stands, My Week merely has moments of decency — not even greatness.
Clark’s ill-advised romance with Monroe feels both laughably implausible and creepily voyeuristic. He is the movie’s biggest flaw and what winds up sinking the whole film.
VERDICT: Great supporting performances aside, My Week with Marilyn fails to do what its title character managed in spades: to delight, enchant and entertain the audience.
chzhang@umdbk.com
