In 1956, Marilyn Monroe travelled to England to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl, a romantic comedy that would go down in movie history as a clunker due in large part to the complete lack of chemistry between Monroe and her co-star Laurence Olivier. An aristocratic 23-year-old named Colin Clark landed his first movie gig as third assistant director on the movie. My Week With Marilyn bills itself as a true story based on Clark’s diaries.
The Prince and the Showgirl was a marriage of convenience. Monroe was already the world’s most famous movie actress, but yearned for the prestige of appearing alongside classically trained actors. Olivier was an acclaimed stage actor who wanted to break into the movies. Monroe was paralyzed by her insecurity and Olivier was incensed at her lack of professionalism. The two were at odds from the beginning.
Michelle Williams’ Monroe is a fleabitten, dead-eyed, prima donna who spends the movie sobbing, staggering, and screwing up in front of the camera. We’re told she’s the world’s biggest sex symbol, but what we see doesn’t match what the characters say.
The real Marilyn was notorious for drug abuse, chronic lateness, and an inability to remember her lines. Yet it’s hard to believe that she would have been quite as pathetic as the movie makes her out to be. The Prince and the Showgirl was made late in Monroe’s career. By 1956, she had already starred in such classics as All About Eve, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Seven Year Itch.
Monroe takes a shine to young Colin, maybe for his own sake, or maybe as part of her power struggle with Olivier. The lad is essentially assigned to babysit her. A completely chaste “romance” blossoms between the dissolute starlet and the callow youth. He gets to watch her in the bath a couple times, they go skinny dipping (complete with the obligatory hiding-the-erection-for laughs), they take walks surrounded by foliage, they tour Windsor Castle and she oohs and ahhs over a dollhouse.
If you’re going to watch a biopic about Marilyn Monroe, you probably already know she was a flake and that she was famous for playing the dumb blonde. But if you like her at all, chances are it’s because she periodically reveals that she’s a lot smarter and shrewder than you’d expect, all without breaking character. As Dodai Stewart of Jezebel observes, this is supposed to be a biopic about Marilyn, but the story is really about the effect she has on men, not about her.
The real Marilyn said she tried to convert Jane Russell to Freud after Russell tried to convert her to born again Christianity on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blonds. She was notoriously addled on the set of Some Like it Hot, but she still found time to read Tom Paine on her breaks.
The problem with My Week With Marilyn is that it strips away all traces of Monroe’s cleverness. Apart from one scene at a press conference, where Monroe trades zingers with impudent British reporters, we don’t get any sense of the artist behind the ditzy sexpot persona. All we see is her childlike neediness. She’s like a wounded animal.
Maybe that’s what Monroe was really like during the week she cozied up to Clark. This is, after all, supposed to be a true story. Or maybe, as a naive 23-year-old, he could only see her animal magnetism and her brokenness. But then the question becomes: Was this memoir good source material for a movie? Hell no.
This is art. If real life was boring, all the more reason to make up something better. At least that way Marilyn could have a personality and some sex.
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