"My Week With Marilyn"

In this most gentle late November last evening we strolled into Fort Green and BAM to see "My Week With Marilyn" about the tense filming of a 1956 "light comedy" in London. Based on a true story, the film dramatizes the relationship between the newly wed to Arthur Miller Marilyn Monroe and a young third assistant director working on his fist movie set.

I have been a casual fan of Monroe's since I first saw her in "Some Like It Hot" on TV when I was maybe 10 years old. Michelle Williams does an earnest job of portraying our cultural icon, Kenneth Branagh is brilliant as the aging Sir Laurence Olivier and Eddie Redmayne plays Colin Clark, the wide-eyed and innocent star struck man/boy at the heart of this story.

Beautifully shot on location, meticulous in every period detail, the film is an intimate behind-the-scenes look at a snapshot in time. While a valiant attempt to depict the mufti-faceted and layered personality of a Hollywood legend, this film seems to only reinforce the stereotypical notions that Marilyn was some sort of idiot-savant with no intellect what-so-ever. Michelle Williams' performance is complex and nuanced and readily worthy of high praise, but director Simon Curtis chooses to view his heroine through the soft focus lens of nostalgia. He gives us a Marilyn at once crushed by fame and disabled by insecurity addicted to both love and Tuinal with very little in between. There's not a moment in the film where she's not hiding behind dark glasses, preening for the camera, flirting with disaster by taking too many pills, or playing up to our adult male fantasy of Marilyn Monroe.

"Shall I be her?" Williams coos at one point in the third act. The "her" I wanted to see was the real Monroe, and there was nothing of reality in this love letter to a preconceived notion of the star.

Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh, Zoë Wanamaker as Paula Strasberg, Emma Watson as Lucy, Judi Dench as Dame Sybil Thorndike and Derek Jacobi as Sir Owen Morshead (a cameo really,but always a joy) round out this all-star cast.

A must see for everyone who is up on everything Marilyn. Also recommended: fragments (2010) Poems, Intimate Notes and Letters By Marilyn Monroe.