MY WEEK WITH MARILYN: she wants to make love to you

The longer this film went on the less like Marilyn Monroe star Michelle Williams became.
It's a thankless task to try and capture the elusive magic that made Marilyn Marilyn and while Williams does her best she never succeeds in achieving much more than a low-wattage pale imitation.
It's to her credit that she eschews the cliched breathy, simpering Monroe to give us a more flesh and blood rendering but if this is what Marilyn was really like it's difficult to figure out how she ever became immortal.

Based on true-life events, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN works much better as a behind the scenes exploration of the troubled 1956 meeting of Hollywood's biggest star and England's most revered actor, Sir Laurence Olivier, to make a mediocre movie which did neither of them credit. If 'The Prince and the Showgirl' is remembered at all today it's as a lesson in how the confluence of two great talents does not necessarily result in movie magic.
Schooled in the no-nonsense 'show must go on' training ground of British repertory theatre, Olivier had no time for Monroe's obsession with 'Method' acting, her reliance on acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker), or her crippling insecurity which made her late for work almost every single day. Olivier's impatience merely amplified Monroe's problems and made for an incredibly stressful working environment.
Enter Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), the 23 year old son of a wealthy family determined to make it on his own in the world of film-making. After landing his first job as third assistant director on Olivier's production, Clark strikes up an unlikely friendship with the newly remarried (to playwright Arthur Miller) Monroe which rapidly turns into something more serious. But is it the real deal or is the emotionally unstable Monroe merely toying with his affections? And will the jealousy that her attentions provoke in her retinue and her co-star scupper Clark's career before it's even properly begun?
There's a definite fairytale aspect to Clark's story - gangly, naive young man falls in love with world's most famous and desirable woman and discovers his feelings are reciprocated - which mirrors the fictional story that Olivier (the Prince) and Monroe (the Showgirl) are acting out on screen, and that's the level on which I found myself enjoying this film. As regular readers of my blog will know, I'm a sucker for classic Hollywood (I know this is a British movie about a British made movie but Monroe's presence ensures it counts as classic Hollywood) so I lapped up the chance to go behind the screen and watch some of the era's biggest names at work and play and get a sense of what they were 'really' like.
Kenneth Branagh, who earned a reputation as the new Olivier in the 1980s and 90s, is magnificent as the real deal. In some scenes his physical resemblance to Sir Laurence is nothing short of spooky, and he almost succeeds in holding his own against Judi Dench who is even more magnificent as 'The Prince and the Showgirl' co-star Sybil Thorndike. Both of these titans of British theatre could be highly theatrical in real life and it's to the credit of Branagh and Dench that they don't portray them as caricatures.
Redmayne is adequate as the star-struck young man who finds himself living the dream of most red-blooded males on the planet, Julia Ormond is totally wrong as Olivier's film star wife Vivian Leigh, and there's an interesting, low-key cameo from Emma Watson as the costume girl who loses Colin's affections to Monroe.
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN never rises to meet the challenge of capturing the high voltage charisma of the characters it portrays. It feels more like a big budget tv movie than a small budget film made for the cinema, and that's rarely an indicator of a film that's built to last.