Title: My Week with Marilyn Director: Simon Curtis Starring: Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Judi Dench Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 Studio: The Weinstein Company Genre(s): Drama Rated:       (For some language)

CONSUMER ADVICE

Parents, there is some brief strong language, some minor nudity, and some sexuality. Recommended for ages 17 and up.

As we see in “My Week with Marilyn” though, she was a difficult person to work with. Marilyn (Michelle Williams) is a nice enough person, but she is prone to emotional breakdowns and is usually late to the set. Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) has nothing good to say about her as a person. But when he flips on the dailies for the day his face softens and he is reminded why he puts with her behavior in the first place. There are only two people who seem able to put up with her: Her acting coach Paula (Zoe Wanamaker) and Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), one of Olivier's assistants (the third to be precise). It is Colin who acts as our eyes and ears for this story.

As someone who has to help Olivier but is falling in love with the famous Marilyn Monroe, he gets to observe everything we see with unique eyes. From the outside we know that he is only fooling himself. He can't possibly think that he can save Marilyn from herself, or that she would give up her life to be with him. Yet he feels differently. Who knows, maybe he's the only one to see her as a real person than as a celebrity. When they walk into a public place and everyone sees Marilyn, she whispers “shall I be her for them?” This movie does touch on something that may have been key to our love affair with her: She felt her life was an act. A façade. It gained her money and fame, but it was never real to her.

If the perfect image she portrayed was never real to her, how could it be real to us? When we fantasize we tend to gravitate towards the unreal and unobtainable. In the case of Marilyn Monroe, she was unreal and unobtainable in more than one way. Michelle Williams captures that about her so effortlessly; even I forgot it was a performance at times. She might not look completely like the real Marilyn, but she captures the ideals that have captured our attention for so many years. “My Week with Marilyn” is a wonderful capsule of an iconic figure that still represents our ideal fantasies years later.

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