Michelle Williams as Monroe comes to England to work on "The Prince and the Showgirl" with Kenneth Branagh as Lawrence Olivier. The film is based on a book by Colin Clark, which documents the difficulties in the professional and personal lives of the stars.
Clark himself is played by Eddie Redmayne, as the third AD, who looks suitably wide-eyed and young. Although he's 24 and Monroe is 30, she takes a shine to him and they spend some private time together, during which he finds himself in her thrall and she treats him as a friend whose hand she can hold during the impact period of the whirlwind she's caught up in. If he was intimate with her, Clark is too discreet to disclose it.
So two of the three principals must be imitations of people whose appearance and demeanor we're already familiar with. Williams does very well by the character. She doesn't look much more like Monroe than any of the other actresses who have imitated her, including Monroe herself, but she has an appeal all her own. She's soft and downy. In each scene, she may screw things up and leave them in unimaginable disorder, but she's slow and deliberate. She doesn't really get across the fact that Monroe was a nervous wreck. She probably fits roughly into the APA's category of "histrionic personality disorder." Her mother wound up in a psychiatric hospital, a bad omen for the kids. Williams' Monroe is often distressed and full of self doubt, but she's never frenzied.
Branagh's impression of Olivier is a hoot. He looks like he's getting a big kick out of doing Lord Olivier's imperious attitudes and his clumsy attempts at foreign dialects -- all of which sounded much alike, only variants of a go-anywhere accent, seeming to emanate from somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Olivier was having serious problems at the time with his wife, Vivian Leigh, who was also psychotic, but that appears to be thrown into the story as an item of gossip. It's amusing to see Branagh looking into the mirror and reciting Shakespeare's lines, then being interrupted to deal with an actress who cannot remember -- or refuses to remember -- to add a simple word ("too") to a single brief line of dialog. Olivier wants to get the job done, while Monroe searched for "the character." It's hilarious to see him stomping around making wisecracks about Monroe not showing up on time again while she's at home busily trying to kill herself.
In many ways, the most interesting role is that of Paula Strasberg, played by Zoe Wanamaker, with her hair severely pulled back to emphasize her strong jaw. The real Strasberg wasn't nearly so grim looking. She and her husband, Lee, ran the highly regarded Actor's Studio in New York. Then Marilyn Monroe showed up and Paula and Lee recognized a bonanza when they saw one. Paula latched on to Monroe as coach and confidante. "All my life I've prayed to God to give me a great actress -- and He's given me YOU." Monroe was reluctant to make a move or say a line without Paula at her shoulder. When Monroe had trouble with a line, claiming she didn't know the motivation and so forth, the pragmatic Olivier advises her to act as if she did, and just read the words. And Paula slips in a response: "The words are in the script but not the character." It was driving Olivier nuts.
Anyway, it's kind of fun. The film strikes me as more comic than tragic, and I'm not sure it wasn't meant to be amusing. It's a sympathetic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but what else could you expect from an inexperienced young Englishman who groveled at the feet of the most famous movie star in the world?
Clark himself is played by Eddie Redmayne, as the third AD, who looks suitably wide-eyed and young. Although he's 24 and Monroe is 30, she takes a shine to him and they spend some private time together, during which he finds himself in her thrall and she treats him as a friend whose hand she can hold during the impact period of the whirlwind she's caught up in. If he was intimate with her, Clark is too discreet to disclose it.
So two of the three principals must be imitations of people whose appearance and demeanor we're already familiar with. Williams does very well by the character. She doesn't look much more like Monroe than any of the other actresses who have imitated her, including Monroe herself, but she has an appeal all her own. She's soft and downy. In each scene, she may screw things up and leave them in unimaginable disorder, but she's slow and deliberate. She doesn't really get across the fact that Monroe was a nervous wreck. She probably fits roughly into the APA's category of "histrionic personality disorder." Her mother wound up in a psychiatric hospital, a bad omen for the kids. Williams' Monroe is often distressed and full of self doubt, but she's never frenzied.
Branagh's impression of Olivier is a hoot. He looks like he's getting a big kick out of doing Lord Olivier's imperious attitudes and his clumsy attempts at foreign dialects -- all of which sounded much alike, only variants of a go-anywhere accent, seeming to emanate from somewhere in Mitteleuropa. Olivier was having serious problems at the time with his wife, Vivian Leigh, who was also psychotic, but that appears to be thrown into the story as an item of gossip. It's amusing to see Branagh looking into the mirror and reciting Shakespeare's lines, then being interrupted to deal with an actress who cannot remember -- or refuses to remember -- to add a simple word ("too") to a single brief line of dialog. Olivier wants to get the job done, while Monroe searched for "the character." It's hilarious to see him stomping around making wisecracks about Monroe not showing up on time again while she's at home busily trying to kill herself.
In many ways, the most interesting role is that of Paula Strasberg, played by Zoe Wanamaker, with her hair severely pulled back to emphasize her strong jaw. The real Strasberg wasn't nearly so grim looking. She and her husband, Lee, ran the highly regarded Actor's Studio in New York. Then Marilyn Monroe showed up and Paula and Lee recognized a bonanza when they saw one. Paula latched on to Monroe as coach and confidante. "All my life I've prayed to God to give me a great actress -- and He's given me YOU." Monroe was reluctant to make a move or say a line without Paula at her shoulder. When Monroe had trouble with a line, claiming she didn't know the motivation and so forth, the pragmatic Olivier advises her to act as if she did, and just read the words. And Paula slips in a response: "The words are in the script but not the character." It was driving Olivier nuts.
Anyway, it's kind of fun. The film strikes me as more comic than tragic, and I'm not sure it wasn't meant to be amusing. It's a sympathetic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but what else could you expect from an inexperienced young Englishman who groveled at the feet of the most famous movie star in the world?