Reel Review: "My Week With Marilyn"

File this one under "willing suspension of disbelief," a necessary frame of mind to employ when taking in a movie or a play. It is an altogether useless tool when watching, say, reality television, when a willing suspension of disgust seems far more appropriate to the material. That and a clothes-pin for the nostrils.

Last night I went to my beloved art-house chain, the Laemmle, to see the Freud versus Jung battle depicted in director David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. I admit to a bias against "costume" or "period" pictures to begin with, but was sufficiently intrigued by the subject matter to put that aside. And then, no more than five minutes into the flick, I start getting way too antsy. Keira Knightley was violently chewing up the scenery in an attempt to depict a young madwoman, and I just couldn't seem to buy into the performance. In a word, I bolted.

Happily, My Week With Marilyn was just starting in the theatre next door, a film which I was determined never to experience after viewing the trailer two or three times. Sometimes, they do such a great job nut-shelling a movie in the previews that you feel you needn't actually see the whole thing! Not only that, but the story of a young gofer — Colin Clark — on a British film set having an almost-affair with the big, bad, sexy Ms. Monroe seemed the stuff of fairy-tales, not drama, per se.

Well, I was a little right and a wee bit wrong to so prejudge the film. First off, the film is based on a memoir by the actual Mr. Clark, who at 23 years old had a wee gig on the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl, starring MM and Sir Laurence Olivier. What I found most amusing about the premise was not the relationship between him and the tragic, iconic blonde of every boy's dreams, but the exasperation that Olivier (played with great mimetic skill by Kenneth Branagh) felt working with the tortured, self-doubting Method-actress. Oil and water get along far better.

Eddie Redmayne is all freckly innocence playing Colin Clark, but the film depends largely on one's ability to buy into Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, which I found fairly easy to do. Her alternate bouts of pill-popping depression and traipsing-through-the-meadow lightheartedness were hard to reconcile, but that's a problem with the screenplay, arguably the film's weakest link. Williams' performance is Oscar-bait (she's already nabbed the Golden Globe), and you'd better believe the Brothers Weinstein will do their darndest to see that she wins.

My Week With Marilyn has an intriguing premise and good central performances, but strikes one as being just slightly underdone. Marilyn Monroe was a complex amalgam of lightness and self-destructive darkness, but this film seems satisfied skimming the surface of her public persona rather than delving into its deeper strata. Add it all up and you have angel-food cake — sweet and light and without any nutritional value whatsoever. Still and all, I'd take Michelle Williams over Keira Knightley any night of the week.