‘My Week with Marilyn’ Mesmerizes

Almost 50 years after her death by prescription drug overdose in 1962, Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most recognizable film stars of all time. Yet much of her personal life is shrouded in mystery. “My Week with Marilyn,” an upcoming film based on the published memoirs of Colin Clark, capitalizes on the ongoing fascination with this iconic personality. Simon Curtis’s movie offers a compelling account of the starlet’s life off-camera, complete with standout performances by Michelle Williams as Monroe and Eddie Redmayne as Clark.

In the film, Clark’s (Eddie Redmayne) story begins with him running away from home in 1956 as a young Oxford graduate, hoping to pursue a career in motion pictures. He becomes an assistant on the set of “The Prince and the Showgirl,” a comedy that cast Monroe (Michelle Williams) alongside celebrated British stage actor Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). Monroe filmed the movie in Britain while on honeymoon with her third husband, American playwright Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott). But when Miller leaves to concentrate on his writing, Monroe behaves erratically, misses work, and abuses sedatives. She seeks emotional support and an escape from the pressures of fame in the open arms of the naive Clark—and thus the titular “week with Marilyn” begins.

Filling the stilettos of such a well-known persona is no easy task, and Williams’s adept portrayal of Monroe reflects her maturity as an actress. She is equally convincing as a sexy showgirl and an overwhelmed and insecure starlet. But while Williams’s performance lends the film glamour and gravitas, the character of Colin Clark, played by Eddie Redmayne, is just as much a star. Redmayne—a 2010 Tony Award winner whose previous work includes “The Other Boleyn Girl” and “The Yellow Handkerchief”—is winningly sympathetic as a man on the cusp of adulthood who is trying to prove that he is more than his aristocratic upbringing.

Director Simon Curtis—best known for the 2007 TV miniseries “Five Days” and a 1999 TV movie adaptation of “David Copperfield”—crafts a film that is both idyllic and surreal, sometimes overly sentimental, and other times witty and elegant. The movie delightfully tempts audiences with its tantalizing glimpses of the hidden world of 1950s cinema. Characters glide between smoke-filled drawing rooms, crowded sets, and English country homes, before a backdrop of jazz and period costumes. The star-studded cast includes Judi Dench as actress Sybil Thorndike and Emma Watson as Clark’s love interest from the wardrobe department, though both roles are unfortunately brief and unremarkable.

“My Week with Marilyn” caters to the public’s inextinguishable curiosity about celebrities. It portrays major names in cinema brought to their knees by their private demons—age, jealousy, fear. Monroe, teetering between sanity and breakdown, cannot shake the idea that she has been cast for her looks rather than her talent. Olivier struggles to reconcile Monroe’s unconventional acting methods with his traditional ideas about theatre. His wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Osmond) was once an actress herself and now dreads her imminent old age. The movie constantly reminds us that there is never enough time—a message driven home by the film’s very premise and the all-too-brief week Clark and Monroe have to spend together touring the English countryside.

Despite its drama, the film seems sanitized. There is only cursory mention of Monroe’s difficult childhood, and not even a hint toward her upcoming early death. Nonetheless, the movie will appeal to lovers of cinema’s golden age and fans of Monroe herself. Like the film industry that charmed Colin Clark, “My Week with Marilyn” is appealing, exciting, and altogether enrapturing.