My Week with Marilyn

It's been a long time since I've enjoyed an acting performance as much as I have here in the case of Michelle Williams. She may lack the sexy sparkle of the real Marilyn Monroe, but she has perfectly nailed her gestures, poses and acting mannerisms, and the many film awards she has won for it are well deserved. (06.03.2012)

An small and intimate film. There are a number of different ways to a biopic about this star, Simon Curtis chose a small small segment of her life, the shooting of one of the films where she played the lead role. The acting is excellent. Again, there are a number of ways to portray Marilyn Monroe, and they bet on her “innocence”, immediacy, and enveloped it in human idealism, and it’s a way you can look at it. I would call this film more a tribute and a positively tuned reminiscence rather than a captivating autobiographical drama about a torn personality. The pace, however, is excellent and overall it is toned down considerably, so that everyone can enjoy it. From costume lovers, dialog sequences, old-school design, acting, to gentle piano music. (25.12.2012)

Colin Clark and his books "The Prince, the Showgirl and Me: the Colin Clark Diaries" (1995) and "My Week with Marilyn" (2000) are mere local phenomena. This is classic British parasitism of Hollywood. The film version of this story is exactly the same - this is how a movie could be made about any movie a Hollywood star made outside the U.S. (what she ate, who fell in love with her, what her husband said...). It’s really an inferior genre. Never mind that we have a fine cast here, represented by names such as Julia Ormond, Derek Jacobi, Judi Dench, and Kenneth Branagh. We also get youth favorites Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, and Michelle Williams (whose interpretation of Monroe is questionable, to say the least). The Prince and the Showgirl was the first project of Marilyn Monroe Productions, so Monroe brought not only her name, the star couple Monroe-Miller, but also money to England, and it is therefore unrealistic to make a film about her as someone whose presence was suffered on the set. (24.08.2021)

Somehow, I can’t get over Marilyn’s behavior. I must admit that people really treated each other this way back then, but all of Marilyn’s good mood stemmed from drugs and everything else hinged on that. The film stands and falls by Marilyn, who was portrayed perfectly by Michelle Williams, but to be honest, I liked watching Emma Watson more. And that’s something considering she had a very secondary role in the movie. Even so, I must admit that it’s a proper piece of filmmaking, properly British. It has the typical British gallantry, which is nice and pleasant, but it can easily bore you to sleep. (13.04.2014)

There was very little missing and this film could have been a good drama about the destructive halos of stars and the circus, which makes people into actors even in the most ordinary of situations. Kenneth Branagh's monologues are good in places, the charge of the noble tragedy of the stage, which was once so beautifully exhaled by the great William. Michelle Williams is also excellent in the role of a lady with a blown skirt - she contains a piece of a sexy being who hypnotizes the world around her and the unstable and disgusting wreckage, which Iveta Bartošová would certainly understand. On the one hand, the film wants to show the other side of show business, whilst on the other hand, it delights nostalgically and impresses with the theater in its entirety. The two tendencies go against each other and shatter each other. The Artist managed to balance this double tension of the Golden Age syndrome in a playful way, which also includes an ironic insight, but the deserving classicist facade of Curtis' film is unable to do anything like that. It is heavy, full of unnecessary kitsch and visual phrases. In the places where the film starts to get good (because it goes beyond a sweaty melodrama and is about a boy from the crowd who touched a star), it always prepares a retreat down a sentimental path. It's such a magnificent promenade of British legends, wonderful performances and characters that have so much pathos and theatrical mannerism in them that you can't see their "other self", which they sometimes talk about in confusion... It’s too bad. (14.02.2012)