My Weekend With Marilyn, manages against the odds, to say something fresh about Marilyn Monroe, surely one of the most documented figures in modern pop culture.
That in itself is an achievement. That it manages this, and is a warm, rich and engaging movie into the bargain, (something that eludes many biopics which though they document the events of someone’s life, leave you oddly disconnected from the person themselves), is nothing short of astonishing.
This is largely thanks to Michelle William’s fragile, nuanced portrayal of this screen icon, through which you get a small sense of who Marilyn Monroe was, no easy feat when who she was exactly was lost long ago to a persona so all-encompassing that it’s doubtful anyone has a sense of the true Marilyn.
Even in 1955, at the height of her fame, Marilyn Monroe struggled with who she was away from the public spotlight. Oh she knew there was a separation between Marilyn Monroe the star, and Normal Jean the actress as evidenced beautifully when she and Colin Clarke (Eddie Redmayne), the young fledgling British filmmaker who spends the titular week with her, find a group of employees gathered at the base of the stairs in Windsor Castle, waiting expectantly for her. Glancing at Colin, she grins mischievously, says “Let’s give them Marilyn shall we?” before slinking down the stairs and vamping it up. She gives them exactly what they want, which is the crafted persona, the sex bomb, the woman that every man’s desired at the time, and every women wanted to be.
The beauty of this movie is that cracks the visage just enough that you get glimpses of the Marilyn that really was. The woman overcome often by overwhelming insecurities, struggling to believe after a tough early life that anyone truly loved and cared for her. The woman who had an uncanny natural knack of knowing what was funny, and of filling the screen with a presence so luminescent that everyone who saw her, even those she had infuriated, had to acknowledge the magnetism of her presence. Yet she was also the lost little girl, a prisoner of fame, and the machine that had grown up around her, afraid of disappointing people, terrified she will lose their love and approval.
But for all the insecurities riven through her psyche, she was well and truly aware of what was what. As Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) remarks at on point, you don’t achieve the level of success Marilyn has in Hollywood without being tough and knowing what you want. She was no dummy, and people who confused breathy blond Marilyn with Norma Jean, the girl determined to escape her blighted past, did so at their peril.
She knew full well that the people who surrounded her were simply looking after their investment in Marilyn the Brand. So when Colin, sweet innocent Colin, assistant to Sir Laurence Olivier, with whom Marilyn is acting in the film that would eventually be released as The Prince and The Showgirl, comes into contact with her, Marilyn clings to him like a downing woman clinging to a buoy in a stormy sea.
And Colin, in awe of the film industry he has just joined, and like most men of his day, in love with the Marilyn construct, surrenders easily to her charm. He believes that he alone is seeing the real Marilyn, the women behind the persona that no one really sees, not even those in her inner circle. While this is undoubtedly naive to some extent, you do get the feeling that Marilyn showed much more of she really was to Colin purely because he was one of the few people she had ever met who was prepared to accept her for she was.
Yes he was starry-eyed at the start, but after seeing Marilyn at her most insecure, drug-addled self, largely left that aside and treated her simply as a person who needed love and affirmation, something Marilyn clearly adored. He was real with her, and honest where so many others were not, and that created a bond with the starlet that few shared.
But it was not a bond strong enough to lure her away from the Hollywood machine, and he gets his heart broken “just a little” as he admits to the costumer designer, Lucy (Emma Watson) with whom he starts a relationship before abandoning her to be with Marilyn, when she can’t forsake the fame and fortune for him.
It took so much from her, but as she wisely realised, it also gave her much, not least a buttress against the howling winds of sadness and rejection and loss that swirled around her almost every minute of every day. Where she couldn’t believe that those close to her really loved her, she could hold onto the real, unflinching adoration of her public, which continues to this day, some 50 years after her untimely death from suicide.
Where My Week With Marilyn succeeds brilliantly is in humanising a woman who ended up being consumed by the very persona that was her salvation through so much of her life. You leave the theatre feeling as if you have been able to glimpse behind the wizard’s curtain and see at least a glimpse of the woman that hid the brave, sassy sex bomb, and that is a good thing since Marilyn, though long gone, only ever wanted to be loved and accepted for who she was.