There’s a famous story about Lord Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man, in which he played an evil Nazi (dentist), that goes something like this.
Dustin Hoffman, playing the good guy, has a scene in which he’s supposed to be exhausted from running. Hoffman, being a good student of the Method school, actually exhausted himself for the scene. Watching him arrive on set bedraggled and panting, Lord Larry said: “Dear boy, wouldn’t it be easier to act?”
Watching My Week with Marilyn, one imagines Lord Larry would have found that line useful in his dealings with Marilyn Monroe. He starred alongside her in a 1957 movie called The Prince and the Showgirl, a movie he also directed — no doubt to his great regret.
The Greatest Actor of His Generation (British) found that directing and acting with the Sexiest Movie Star of Her Generation, Possibly of All Time (American) was no easy task, as My Week with Marilyn narrates.
Cripplingly insecure
It wasn’t just that Monroe was a Method(ish) actor, though she did have an acting coach with her throughout her work on such movies. It was that she was chronically, cripplingly insecure — and often blasted on various prescription drugs by the time she reached the set, if she got there at all.
The drugs doubtless made her psychological problems worse, and her acting coach had, also, to serve as a confessor and what, today, we’d call a personal motivator. We should all have such help.
My Week with Marilyn tells the story of at least part of the troubled shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl. It was made in Britain, so Monroe and her then husband, playwright Arthur Miller, had to be housed in secret luxury, and the film has an enthusiastic young man working for the film company sent to find such a retreat for Miss Monroe.
That young man is Colin Clark, employed (largely on the basis of his sheer enthusiasm) by Olivier’s production company at the time, and it is based on his memoir of working on the movie and, in the process, getting rather close to Monroe.
The story is told from Colin’s perspective, and it’s very attractively and sensitively done. Eddie Redmayne plays Colin; he may be remembered from Shekhar Kapur’s second movie about Queen Elizabeth I, in which he took the part of a would-be assassin. He doesn’t have the red mane his surname would seem to promise, but he does have enough in the way of freckles to contribute to an effectively youthful, naive, even callow look, which serves him well in this movie. He can also, as Lord Larry would have said, act.
Faithful imitation
Monroe is played by Michelle Williams, who does a good-enough job of portraying the actor’s vanities, insecurities and fears, as well as her breathy-sexy schtick — a much-imitated schtick that now cannot be read as anything but a slightly parodic imitation. But then that points up, too, how much of an act it was in the first place. Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame plays Colin’s more suitable love interest, and she does it with a perfectly understated ease.
The Olivier role is taken by Kenneth Branagh, who must have sprung immediately to the casting director’s mind because he followed so faithfully in Olivier’s footsteps, directing and starring in movies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry V, just as Olivier did (though not in that order).
Branagh has also, of course, been hailed as the Greatest Actor of His Generation (British), so that fits. And a very creditable job he does, avoiding the specifically Olivierian tics or bits of business except for key moments: that extravagant roll of the eyes, the particular mix of bark and flow that was Lord Larry’s Special Shakespearean Voice.
And then there’s Judi Dench, who plays another great forebear in the British acting tradition, Dame Sybil Thorndike. The part is smallish, but as such actors know there are no small parts, only small actors, and Dench does a lot with a little.
In all, My Week with Marilyn is a lovely little film with plenty of charm, some humour, a bittersweet flavour, and a nice feeling of solidly contained Britishness — including all those very reliable and commendable actors. If Lord Larry could see it he might well wish, with a fervent eye-roll, that his own Marilyn movie had turned out so well.