My Week with Marilyn

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Movie Details

• Genre: Drama
• Release Date: 2011-11-23 Limited
• Running Time: 96 min.
• Director: Simon Curtis
• Cast: Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Julia Ormond, Dougray Scott, Judi Dench, Dominic Cooper, Emma Watson, Toby Jones, Derek Jacobi
• Producer: Colin Vaines, David Parfitt, Mark Cooper, Cleone Clark
• Writer: Adrian Hodges
• Distributor: The Weinstein Company
• Official Site: My Week with Marilyn Official Site

In the TV-movie-quality impersonation that is Simon Curtis's My Week With Marilyn, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) has arrived in 1956 London to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by and co-starring Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). The pill-addled peroxide blonde sweeps onto Olivier's set with an entourage and habitually misses call times, holing up in her dressing room and searching for the character in a vanity mirror while emptying bottles of champagne. Production is soon at an impasse, as Monroe and Olivier, both surrounded by sycophants, throw knee-jerk tantrums. This bad behavior is seen through the hardly impartial eyes of third assistant director Colin (Eddie Redmayne), a role based on Colin Clark, whose two memoirs about his relationship with Monroe on the Showgirl shoot inspired this movie. Filmed through the Vaseline-smeared gaze of a schoolboy deluded by his crush, My Week With Marilyn is an oddly chaste movie about a sex goddess that not only shies away from depicting sex, but also from examining its titular character's own sexuality as it manifested itself in her real life and as a consumer product. Shimmying stiffly in too-tight dresses, exaggerated belly padding protruding awkwardly off her modern waif frame, Williams's voice and movements reflect study but not feeling. You never forget that you're watching a talented living actress laboring to mimic a long-gone movie star who — on-screen, at least — never seemed to be acting at all.