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Michelle Williams and “My Week With Marilyn”

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Aloysius J. Gleek:


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXfBcz2bLNs[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJRC7HGRn4I&feature[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNeL4Q4JMlA[/youtube]
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Aloysius J. Gleek:



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO_vzrLykso&feature[/youtube]



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHqmZOdeYNo&feature[/youtube]
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Aloysius J. Gleek:


http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/my_week_with_marilyn_michelle_williams_dazzling_oscar_bid/


“My Week With Marilyn”:
Michelle Williams’ dazzling Oscar bid
The indie star is wondrous, sexy and sweet as
doomed screen goddess Marilyn Monroe in a
lightweight British comedy

By Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Nov 22, 2011 8:00 PM 07:35:25 EST


Dougray Scott and Michelle Williams in "My Week with Marilyn"


We’re about halfway through the stagey, enjoyable behind-the-scenes comedy “My Week With Marilyn” when we hear Kenneth Branagh, playing Laurence Olivier, raging about his costar in the 1957 mishmash “The Prince and the Showgirl.” Teaching Marilyn Monroe how to act, sputters Branagh-as-Olivier, is “like teaching Urdu to a badger.” It’s a funny line, albeit loaded with the imperial condescension Sir Larry evidently felt for the American girl from nowheresville who held the whole world in thrall. But as even Olivier would eventually admit, some badgers just know how to communicate, with or without language instruction.

Most of the chatter around “My Week With Marilyn” will inevitably concern Michelle Williams’ magnetic Oscar-bait performance as the off-screen Monroe, and my only two words on that subject are yes and yes. (Yes, she’s wonderful and yes, she’ll probably win, although I’m still pulling for Ellen Barkin or Kirsten Dunst.) But this film adapted from the memoirs of one-time Olivier assistant Colin Clark also does the service of reminding us that Marilyn Monroe was something more than the Kim Kardashian of her day. She drove Olivier nuts precisely because she had no idea what she was doing as an actress and lacked the kind of discipline and work ethic on which theater-trained actors like him relied — and because in scene after scene in that movie, she blew him away.

As we see her here (and by all accounts this is pretty true to life) Monroe could utterly butcher her lines on the first take, space out and suffer a minor panic attack on the second, and then deliver a perfect, funny, sexy, ingratiating reading on the third, the sort of thing that convinced the audience she was on their side, even playing in a sub-mediocre transatlantic comedy opposite a slumming Shakespearean. Playing to the camera like that was simply not something that Olivier, one of the greatest actors in the history of British theater, was capable of doing. As Branagh plays Olivier, he feels superior to Monroe, superior to the material, and generally insulted by the whole experience. Yet he’s also bitterly aware that even amid her apparent terror and incompetence, Monroe can illuminate the frame, leaving him standing there like an item of spare furniture doing an atrocious Dracula accent. (I’m tempted to accuse Branagh of camping it up in this odd, meta-actorly performance — one great Shakespeare actor playing another — except that I’m not sure one can camp up Laurence Olivier quite enough.)

“My Week With Marilyn” is the kind of shtick-laden movie in the British TV mode that delivers all its laughs, and all its grand, declamatory moments, right on schedule. I’m delighted to recommend it, as long as you know what you’re in for: “The King’s Speech” has the subtlety of Chekho in comparison. Everyone in the supporting cast seems to have worked really hard on his or her accent and is overly proud to show it off, perhaps to conceal that every single aspect of the story is both familiar and predictable. Even when you’ve got Americans playing Americans (Zoë Wanamaker as Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg) or Brits playing Brits (Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s wife at the time) there’s a thick, greasy coating of histrionics. And then you get a whole parade of overconfident British actors doing exaggerated Noo Yawk accents that suggest Rodney Dangerfield topped with gefilte fish: Toby Jones as Monroe’s agent, Arthur Jacobs; Dominic Cooper as photographer-turned-producer Milton Greene; and Dougray Scott, doing a splendid Arthur Miller as long as he keeps his mouth shut. Sure, this is a British production, and that’s great. But they couldn’t get an actual New York actor to play Arthur freakin’ Miller?

Against that backdrop we get the thoroughly winning, borderline-apocryphal fable of the almost-romance that developed during the summer 1956 shoot of “Showgirl” between Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a wide-eyed, upper-crust college grad who had latched onto Olivier, and the Western world’s most famous star. According to Vivien Leigh, Olivier arrived on set as both star and director expecting to seduce Monroe, but their relationship turned sour almost immediately. Monroe hid in her dressing room or her rented Surrey mansion, Olivier fumed, and the handsome, gawky Clark was deputized to be their go-between. There’s really no one left alive to testify to the intimate details of Clark’s relationship with Monroe, but by his account he served mainly as her pal and confidant after Miller fled back to America. Were they lovers? The film doesn’t directly answer that, and I get the feeling that the answer depends on what you think the question means.

I’m a huge admirer of Michelle Williams, but I’m used to seeing her play indie-film characters who sleep in their cars or brave the Oregon Trail. In the abstract I wouldn’t have assumed she had either the physicality or the luminosity to pull off Marilyn Monroe. But from her thoroughly delectable opening number, her performance is relaxed, natural and utterly captivating, capturing Monroe’s precise blend of innocence and eroticism. You could say that the character Williams develops is rootless and uncentered, but one suspects that was true of Marilyn in real life, vacillating between the public sex-symbol persona that threatened to swallow her and the uncertain girl from a messed-up family who was plagued by anxieties and the threat of mental illness.

You can see why she liked Clark, who in Redmayne’s portrayal is supremely smitten, utterly guileless and thoroughly English, three things Arthur Miller — who was clearly having second thoughts about his celebrity spouse — certainly was not. She goes skinny-dipping in a pond at Oxford, in blatant violation of that ancient establishment’s rules, and thrills the university’s service workers by descending a staircase in full Marilyn mode. “Shall I be her?” she purrs to Colin, before striking poses and blowing kisses. As the world would soon find out, the performance of being Marilyn Monroe was too much for her. The performance of being a charming English boy’s pretend girlfriend for a week may have been a welcome respite, or at least it’s nice to think so.

Aloysius J. Gleek:



          .

Aloysius J. Gleek:




http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/movies/my-week-with-marilyn-with-michelle-williams-review.html



Movie Review
My Week With Marilyn (2011)
Glamorous Sex Goddess,
Longing to Be Human

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 22, 2011


Eddie Redmayne as Colin Clark, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller and Michelle Williams as
Marilyn Monroe in "My Week With Marilyn."


In 1976, the year that Marilyn Monroe would have turned 50, Larry McMurtry wrote that she “is right in there with our major ghosts: Hemingway, the Kennedy brothers — people who finished with American life before America had time to finish with them.” Almost a half-century after her death, the world, or at least its necrophiliac fantasists, still haven’t finished with Monroe and try to resurrect her again and again in movies, books, songs and glamour layouts featuring dewy and ruined ingénues. Maybe it’s because it’s so difficult to imagine her as Old Marilyn that she has become a Ghost of Hollywood Past, a phantom that periodically materializes to show us things that have been.

The latest attempt at resurrection occurs in “My Week With Marilyn,” with Michelle Williams as the Ghost. The movie is largely based on a slim 2000 book that a British documentary filmmaker, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne, in a role of many smiles and little depth), claimed was a true account of an intimate interlude he spent with Monroe in 1956 while they were making “The Prince and the Showgirl.” At the time Monroe was newly married to Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and hoped that the film, based on a Terence Rattigan play, would help her move past sexpot roles. But the shoot turned into a clash of egos and cultures that threw her, leading her co-star and director, Laurence Olivier, to damn her as “the stupidest, most self-indulgent little tart I’ve ever come across.”

This is Sir Larry the Cruel, an assessment cemented by the miscast Kenneth Branagh’s intermittently amusing, unctuous take on Olivier as a pitifully vain, insensitive clod. Those familiar with Olivier, who was 49 when he made “Showgirl” and still strikingly handsome, may be distracted by the physical differences between him and Branagh, whose soft face registers as a blur compared with Olivier’s sculptured solidity. Branagh makes up for this disparity somewhat with his crisp, at times clipped, enunciation and a physical performance that gives Olivier enough vitality so that when, early in, the character sweeps into his production office with his wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond, a wan placeholder for the original), he dazzles Clark and jolts this slow-stirring movie awake.

Clark, the son of the art historian Kenneth Clark, decided at 23, as he put it, to run away to the circus by working in the movies, an easy enough goal because his parents were friends with Olivier and Leigh. He became a glorified gofer on “Showgirl” (officially, its third assistant director), a position that involved managing Monroe, who during the shoot soon went from bad to worse, from late to missing in action. Her already strained marriage was one reason; Olivier was another. “Just be sexy,” he told Monroe, “isn’t that what you do?” No wonder she misbehaved: The man she idolized as the world’s greatest actor — and whom her production company hired — was a chauvinist bum.

He didn’t get Monroe, and she is similarly out of the grasp of this movie. Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that’s almost enough. She’s too thin for the role, more colorlessly complected than creamy, but she whispers and wobbles nicely. (The costumes hug her tight, but wrongly round out her breasts, which should thrust like rockets ready for liftoff.)

The problem isn’t Ms. Williams or the serviceable work of the director Simon Curtis, but a script by Adrian Hodges that hews faithfully to Clark’s clichés. Instead of the complex woman familiar from the better books about her, the film offers a catalog of Monroe stereotypes: child, woman, smiling exhibitionist, shrieking neurotic, the barefooted free spirit and, lamentably, the martyr teetering in heels toward her doom.

The tragic Monroe is obviously dramatic, but the intimations of disaster don’t fit a movie that works so hard to be breezily, easily likable. Everything on screen looks good and period-appropriate, if also too manicured, as if the past had been digitally spruced up. Mr. Curtis, who has long directed for television (his credits include the 1999 BBC production of “David Copperfield”), here tends to arrange everything in the frame neatly, often by putting people and other focal points dead center. This isn’t uncommon in comedy, where such centeredness helps build tension as you wait for comic anarchists to wreck a meticulously organized world. In “My Week With Marilyn,” this visual approach adds nothing and comes across as generic, as do as the jerky, handheld newsreel shots and popping photo bulbs.

Mr. Curtis enlivens the movie with music, busyness and Zoe Wanamaker’s darkly comic, toadying turn as Monroe’s acting coach, Paula Strasberg, as well as, always, the promise of the real Monroe. (Emma Watson has a thankless part as a diversion for Clark.) Mr. Curtis’s most unwise filmmaking move, however, is to put Ms. Williams continually into familiar Monroe poses and quote her famous photos and films — nude Marilyn, tousled Marilyn, singing Marilyn — a strategy that undermines his efforts to turn the idol into a person. He shows that Monroe is aware enough of her image that she knows — with a wink, a smile, a shake and a shimmy — how to turn her persona on for public consumption, but he too can’t escape wanting and always returning to that Marilyn Monroe.

“Shall I be her?” she asks Clark, who, like this film, would like nothing better.

“My Week With Marilyn” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Foul language, drug and alcohol abuse and discreet female nudity.


MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

Directed by Simon Curtis; written by Adrian Hodges, based on the diaries of Colin Clark, “The Prince, the Showgirl and Me” and “My Week With Marilyn”; director of photography, Ben Smithard; edited by Adam Recht; music by Conrad Pope, with “Marilyn’s Theme” by Alexandre Desplat, piano solos by Lang Lang; production design by Donal Woods; costumes by Jill Taylor; produced by David Parfitt and Harvey Weinstein; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes.

WITH: Michelle Williams (Marilyn Monroe), Kenneth Branagh (Laurence Olivier), Eddie Redmayne (Colin Clark), Dominic Cooper (Milton Greene), Philip Jackson (Roger Smith), Derek Jacobi (Owen Morshead), Toby Jones (Arthur Jacobs), Michael Kitchen (Hugh Perceval), Julia Ormond (Vivien Leigh), Simon Russell Beale (Cotes-Preedy), Dougray Scott (Arthur Miller), Zoe Wanamaker (Paula Strasberg), Emma Watson (Lucy) and Judi Dench (Sybil Thorndike).

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