Simon Curtis (2011)
At the time she came to London to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe was (allegedly) described, by Queen Elizabeth II, as ‘the most famous woman in the world’. This film and its source material – Colin Clark’s 1995 memoir – depend on an understanding of who Marilyn was and what eventually happened to her; on the traction between Clark’s unique personal experience, as third assistant director on The Prince and the Showgirl, of Marilyn and our own experience, as filmgoers. Simon Curtis is able to make this clear from the start: Colin’s first encounter with Marilyn is from the stalls of his local cinema. The youngest son of what he describes in his opening voiceover as ‘a family of overachievers’, Colin is film crazy and gets a junior job with Olivier’s production company. (It’s a typical screen recruitment – a mixture of mild persistence, happy accident and wishing will make it so.) Working with Olivier destroys what little self-esteem Marilyn has at the start; once she reads what Arthur Miller, her husband of three weeks, has written in his notebook (presumably his early ideas for After the Fall), she’s falling to pieces, Twenty-three-year-old Colin Clark, on his first film assignment, becomes her confidant. Thanks largely to him, Marilyn gets through the film. She then returns to America and Miller and, as the closing legends remind us, Some Like It Hot.
It follows that My Week with Marilyn also depends critically on the performance of the lead actress, and Michelle Williams is terrific – especially when there’s just the one screen between us and her. Holed up in a big house in the country for the duration of the filming, Marilyn seems imprisoned in its rooms: her sense of freedom when she and Colin are outdoors is palpable yet she still seems to be driven, in search of something. These moments are perfectly satisfying because Williams’ lovely, desperate sense of abandon corresponds with what we think of as the ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe. In fact, the Marilyn mythology is so strong we may feel we know that’s what she was really like – and that makes it tough for anyone playing her. Unless the script is clever enough to get us to see her in a different light – and this one isn’t – Marilyn’s interpreter, if she doesn’t accord to our expectations, may seem to be acting ultra vires. (I’m struck writing this how natural it seems to call her ‘Marilyn’ rather than ‘Monroe’, how unusual that is, how it seems to say something about our sense of a close relationship with her.) An actress can only do so much with Marilyn Monroe but Michelle Williams does a great deal.
In the sequences of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, Williams’ recreation of Marilyn is very fine – especially the bit when Marilyn’s character Elsie does a jiggling dance and sings to herself. When we watch Williams as an image projected from a screen within the screen (when Colin watches Marilyn in the cinema or Olivier looks at rushes), she’s a beautiful, appealing performer but she isn’t Marilyn Monroe. No amount of skilful make-up can replicate the peculiar quality of flesh that made Marilyn seem carnal and ethereal at the same time (especially in black-and-white films). Williams doesn’t have either the original’s unique presence – which was overpowering in a remarkably unself-conscious way. In the offscreen sequences, however, she’s very successful both at getting across Marilyn’s strange combination of lewdness and innocence, and at suggesting that Marilyn was well aware of the power of her vivid sexiness without being able fully to control, let alone explain it. She wants to be loved: you see it in her instant reaction to the fans who spot her outside Asprey’s on a Saturday afternoon; you see it again when she wiggles down a flight of steps at Windsor Castle to the delight of a fleet of lackeys there. But the pleasure in Bond Street turns quickly to terror as she’s mobbed. (Marilyn’s entourage think it will be quiet as it’s ‘early closing’ day. It seems astonishing now but I can remember that much of central London was close to becalmed on Saturday afternoons even a quarter-century later, in the early 1980s.) At one point, Marilyn asks Colin why people want to get close to her but, when they do, want to leave her. She’s thinking of husbands rather than crowds but the mobbing suggests, albeit very baldly, that she likes drawing people to her but gets scared when they’re too close.
Perhaps because Simon Curtis and the screenwriter Adrian Hodges don’t find a way to convey the incredibleness of Colin Clark’s experience – how the stuff of fantasy became part of working life – Eddie Redmayne as Colin can’t quite either. But maybe that’s right: if you’re as inexperienced and unassuming as Colin is shown to be and you find yourself in sudden, unforeseeable proximity to a legendary sex symbol, you might well lose a sense of her particularity. Redmayne is perfectly cast here Although he’s nearly thirty, he passes easily for the twenty-three-year-old Colin; in fact, he passes for someone younger and Colin’s faint irritation with people thinking he’s younger is one of the many likeable things in this intelligent and nuanced performance. (It’s also touching, given the chasm between them in other ways, that there’s not that much age difference between Colin and Marilyn, who’s thirty.) Redmayne’s charm was enough to eclipse my prejudice against Colin Clark’s family (his father was Kenneth and his elder brother Alan). There are moments when it’s enough to throw the film off balance – occasionally his open, handsome face makes him a more luminous camera subject than Michelle Williams. When Colin, besotted with Marilyn, pleads with her to give up her film career and live happily with him, it’s hard to tell whether this is clever or clichéd writing: is the film fanatic Colin coming out with a line he’s heard plenty of times on screen or can’t Adrian Hodges come up with anything better? Redmayne convinces you of Colin’s sincerity so it doesn’t really matter. He’s extremely good at showing us how Marilyn turns him on – whether he’s watching her on screen or she’s skinny-dipping with him (Colin remains a gent – polite and protective – even when he’s having an erection). Redmayne’s main successes to date have been on stage, including an Olivier award and a Tony for Red. He may prove to be too lightweight for leading roles on screen – unless the structure of the role is as particular as this one (Colin, although he’s the central consciousness, isn’t required to carry the film). But there’s no doubting that Eddie Redmayne is impressive as well as engaging here.
Kenneth Branagh’s jowels and portliness blunt the sharpness of Laurence Olivier’s egotism but the casting is apt because of Branagh’s ‘new Olivier’ cachet of twenty years ago and it’s a richly enjoyable impersonation. The vocal mimicry is accomplished and very witty: if there are moments when Branagh seems to be concentrating so hard on achieving a particular technical effect that he comes over as clever but hollow that’s hardly a fault: it gives him a kinship with the man he’s playing. Simon Curtis concentrates on Olivier’s exasperation with Marilyn’s hopeless timekeeping, her failure to remember or understand her lines, her lack of ‘craft’: when Branagh and Williams are playing their scenes in The Prince and the Showgirl, you don’t feel the brutal competitiveness of Olivier’s acting in the film. But when Marilyn’s manager, watching rushes with Olivier, mutters that once she’s on song you don’t notice anyone else on screen, Branagh shows how deeply the remark hurts. Hodges’ dialogue is serviceable but you often want the script to be more penetrating than it is. When Colin tells Marilyn she’s a great star who wants to be a great actress, and Olivier’s a great actor who wants to be a great star, and The Prince and the Showgirl won’t help either of them, you’d like her to respond more vigorously. When, later on, Colin tries to persuade Marilyn to leave her bed and her bottles of tablets, go back to Pinewood and ‘show everyone you’re a great actress’, you want her to remind him what he said before. Marilyn has Paula Strasberg with her in England (though at one stage she yells that she wants Lee instead); the mostly sarcastic remarks about Method acting are pretty feeble and Zoe Wanamaker can’t do much with the role of Paula but Branagh has a particularly good bit when Paula insists that Marilyn ‘can’t believe her character would do that’ and Olivier spits back, ‘Then tell her to pretend to believe!’
As Sybil Thorndike the woman, Judi Dench’s characterisation is deft and precise; when she plays Thorndike acting in The Prince and the Showgirl she’s busily, fruitlessly theatrical – as Thorndike was in the picture. At first it seems that Sybil Thorndike is just being kind to Marilyn but, when she tells her she knows how to act on camera in a way that eludes the British acting aristocracy, Judi Dench leaves you in doubt this is meant to be the honest truth. It’s an irony, of course, that Dench, a great film actress, delivers this line. (And when Sybil Thorndike scolds Olivier for bullying Marilyn and he doesn’t answer back, you sense a resonance with Kenneth Branagh’s admiration of Judi Dench.) I’ve concentrated even more than usual on the acting but different kinds and qualities of acting are a main theme of My Week with Marilyn and in evidence on screen. It’s quite a cast – well-known faces in even the smallest parts. Simon Russell Beale creates a complete character with half a dozen lines (and an amusing hairdo); Toby Jones and Michael Kitchen do well in slightly larger roles; Derek Jacobi, as the Windsor Castle art historian (Colin’s godfather), is better than he’s been recently – you can see how Marilyn’s charming him. Jim Carter is the landlord of the inn where’s Colin staying during the shoot – and sceptical that his guest is really hobnobbing with film stars. Carter is broad as usual but gets a good payoff when Marilyn calls into the pub to say goodbye to Colin. I was pleasantly surprised by Emma Watson as the girl in wardrobe whom Colin takes a shine to until Marilyn absorbs him. Julia Ormond is disappointingly bland as Vivien Leigh, though, and the few people you expect to be weak are: Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller (he looks more like William Holden) and Dominic Cooper, who’s abominably crude and one-note as the manager ‘who owns 49% of Marilyn’.
My Week with Marilyn is nothing special – and you’re always aware of that – but it’s interesting and entertaining and full of good things. Because Marilyn Monroe’s story is an unhappy one, the ending of the film has a sadness beyond the tone of regret in Colin’s voiceover (I liked it that he was remembering with the voice still of a young man – the real Colin Clark died in 2002). There’s also a good joke in the film, which Simon Curtis doesn’t overplay. In all the closeness between Marilyn and Colin, we never lose sight of the fact that it’s actually Roger Smith, the detective hired to look after Marilyn during her time in England, who’s the constant presence in her life there. Humorously lugubrious Philip Jackson is just right for this all-seeing, never-smiling officer of the law, who, when he gets the assignment, hasn’t even heard of Marilyn Monroe (‘I’m not much of one for the pictures’). The exchange between Colin and Olivier is uninspired when Olivier tells Colin that John Osborne’s written a role for him and Colin says, ‘But I thought you hated all that Royal Court stuff’. However, when Kenneth Branagh looks at his face in the mirror as he’s applying his Ruritanian prince make-up and observes that ‘I’m dead behind these eyes’, the moment has a real charge – whether or not it’s actually true that Olivier gave Osborne one of Archie Rice’s most famous lines.
3 December 2011
