My Week With Marilyn DVD
Starring: Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne, Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Watson
Director: Simon Curtis
Rating: 4/5
Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most fascinating women that has ever graced this big screen and Michelle Williams has the unenviable task of becoming this screen icon.
In the early summer of 1956, 23 year-old Colin Clark, just down from Oxford and determined to make his way in the film business, worked as a lowly assistant on the set of ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’, the film that famously united Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, who was also on honeymoon with her new husband, the playwright Arthur Miller.
Nearly 40 years on, his diary account ‘The Prince, the Showgirl and Me’ was published, but one week was missing and this was published some years later as ‘My Week with Marilyn’ - this is the story of that week.
Williams is one of the more understated actresses in Hollywood but her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe really does show that she is a big screen powerful She totally embodies Monroe from the opening scene to the rolling credits and shows the conflict between the woman the world adored and the troubled soul behind closed doors.
It is a very moving performance from Williams as she shows Monroe's daily struggle with being the most famous woman in the world and her desperate need to find someone that loves her.
She is supported by a fabulous cast as Eddie Redmayne, who plays Colin, really steps into his own with this movie as the caring and concerned third assistant on whom Monroe leans.
And Kenneth Branagh is superb as the exacerbated Laurence Olivier who struggles to direct Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl.
There are some interesting moments between in Branagh and Redmayne as Olivier is portrayed as a man still trying to hold onto youth and discover where his place now is in an industry that he once dominated.
Emma Watson, Judi Dench & Dominic Cooper appear throughout the film and it would have been nice to see more of all of them - especially Dench.
Curtis has shot a really beautiful movie that captures that heart and the essence of a by gone era - there is a certain amount of magic in this film as we see some of the greatest stars brought to life on the big screen.
However the pace of the movie is a little pedestrian, but really is the film's only fault. This is an enchanting movie that takes you into the past and brings you face to face with one of cinema's biggest icons - telling a truly heartbreaking tale along the way.
My Week With Marilyn is out on DVD & Blu-Ray now
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in Michelle Williams