"My Week With Marilyn": A Movie Review.

May 11, 2011 at 11:03 A.M. At 9:10 A.M. I received a call from a strange cell phone number: 347-297-0816. A single word was deleted from this text and other "errors" may have been inserted in the essay which had been left alone for a while. I will continue to write.

I was strolling down Broadway, minding my own business, when I encountered a woman handing out leaflets for a premiere of a Kenneth Branagh film entitled, "My Week With Marilyn." I was captivated by the title of this still unreleased film.

Oh, for a muse of fire that might ascend to the brightest heaven of invention ... or fantasy. What I would not do for a week -- even a single night! -- with Marilyn, my Marilyn.

I learned that this film concerns the encounter between Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1956 film production, "The Prince and the Show Girl." With some minor errors, the plot line is historically accurate.

I decided to ask Marilyn, mentally -- since I am unable to see my leading actress sharing a "stage" name (that happens to be her real name) with a lady once called "Norma Jean" -- to accompany me to the "Stage Delicatessen" for a great meal, then to Sony Theaters on Broadway, near Lincoln Center, for this glamorous premiere at which no Hollywood stars would appear.

Marilyn accepted with a charming blush and nervous smile: "I used to sell kisses for the Red Cross," she said.

I responded quickly: "I'll take a dozen of those kisses." I dressed elegantly -- if somewhat casually -- selecting the right ascot and monocle. Marilyn wore a lovely white dress that fluttered in the wind when the subway trains rolled by. We made quite a pair.

As they say on the A-train: "What's the movie really about?" Well, that is a loaded question: What this movie is "about" depends as much on the viewer as on the actors and director, or writer. At the most obvious level, the film concerns the genuine historical figures making this movie in 1956.

Dame Judy Dench is excellent, as always, as the equally great Sybil Bedford, who must have been (in "real" life) the soul of human kindness and not the monstre sacre and grand dame that I always envisioned. I wonder whether Ms. Dench could have met Ms. Bedford? I doubt it. (Yes, that is how those terms are spelled in French.)

Olivier was noted for going into contortions over the "shenanigans" of Marilyn Monroe whose late arrivals, drug-addled inability to remember lines, crying fits, seductions of male persons of all varieties drove the British thespian "mad."

A delightful Emma Watson is beautiful and promising after her first year at Brown University and a reprieve from Hogwarts Academy. Ms. Watson is interested in "accounting." The young British actor playing the boy lead is also excellent. Something in the English rain produces great actors in every generation. If only Mr. Cameron had decided to try his fortune on the stage, what a wonderful comedian might have amused all of us.

Olivier was also the epitome of charm and old world ease, offering a validation and encouragement that Marilyn sought, desperately, as her marriage was falling apart and her long irreversible collapse into severe depression and eventual suicide quickly followed the loss of Mr. Miller. The film was a great success much to the surprise of Olivier:

"After the press conference," Norman Mailer has Marilyn Monroe explain to readers, "I could see that Sir Laurence Olivier was annoyed. It's terrible being the Number Two actor anywhere. [Male ego.] 'Oh yes,' they say, 'you were good too.' You feel like the younger kid in a family that's put its hopes on the older one. I knew Sir Laurence wasn't used to that but, I thought, 'Well, competition never hurt anybody.' Which was definitely one of Amy's ideas, not Arthur's."

Norman Mailer, Of Women and Their Elegance (New York: Tom Doherty, 1980), p. 185.

At a deeper level, the film is concerned with the Anglo-American comedy in the twentieth century. American innocence and goodness, perhaps ingenuousness is "coupled" with British experience and diplomacy, suggesting almost a childish quality shared by the "awesome" Ms. Monroe with a British boy -- a boy whose adoration brings the child-woman back to life. This is Henry James by way of Hollywood. Pass me the popcorn.

Most interesting, for me, is the hermeneutic puzzle placed on screen by our witty director whose authentic philosophical overtures have dazzled me in the past. Yes, I am the one person who liked Frankenstein. Identity is a matter of smoke and mirrors for the players and all of us. Shakespeare's disguises and theatricality in romantic comedy are obvious influences on our clever "youngish" director. Hence, the reference to "The Tempest" at the conclusion of the film.

We see Kenneth Branagh, as Laurence Olivier in a film from 1956, as interpreted by a writer and an obscure British director often compared to the man who was eventually Lord Olivier only loosely based on a historical figure called "Sir Laurence Olivier." This "insubstantial pageant" -- our lovely art house film -- is witches' and warlock's trickery, a conjurer's deception, yet so "real" to us.

What is "real"? Who is the "real" you? Is there a "real" you? Or are you only a performance? Ms. Winslet, please discuss.

Unlike Mr. Branagh or Mr. Olivier -- nor Michelle Williams, for that matter, who does a fine job in a daunting challenge -- "Norma Jean's" performance as "Marilyn Monroe" and her entire life was a thing made with gossamer wings: fragile, broken, already in the process of disintegrating in 1956 as Marilyn became pathologically emotionally needy, hungry for validation in the form women have been taught to crave that becomes progressively more difficult as they get older.

Marilyn Monroe would be dead in less than ten year's time after the completion of "The Prince and the Showgirl." I am sure this had to do with her fear of being too old to generate the necessary response from men. No longer being able to compete with younger rivals in tinsel land, Marilyn would have died slowly or quickly. She preferred quickly.

On display as cautionary tale is Olivier's soon-to-be-discarded wife Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), one of the great actresses of the century and a magnificent film star ("Scarlet O'Hara" in "Gone With the Wind") who was even more screwed-up than Marilyn and just as suicidal for many of the same reasons: "I tried," Mr. Olivier explained in his memoir, "to screw her out of her depression." Gallantry at all times, Larry?

I hope to live in a world where delighting men and "pleasing" others with their looks will not be women's only means of winning approval. Mr. Branagh has, perhaps unknowingly, provided us with a feminist film, as beautifully understood by Ms. Williams, who captures some of the tragedy of this woman who was "Marilyn Monroe" but who died as "Norma Jean." Ms. Williams may have stolen the movie from her British colleagues as Marilyn Monroe stole her movie from Olivier.

Plagiarists, please do me the courtesy of a mention if you steal my words. Do not tamper with my work. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

How does an actor find a character or become an identity?

"Now Lee, that is, Mr. Strasberg, had a vocabulary a lot of people liked to make fun of. He used words [such] as 'adjustment' and 'contact' and 'concentration' and they were hard to understand if you were not an actor. When it came to doing a part, I used to believe that if the role was good, it was actually living out there the way a spirit might be out there," -- escaping those breasts and hips, Marilyn? -- "except you didn't use a crystal ball to find the role, you made contact. You could sort of feel when you got into the person you were playing. It was more like the role came to you. In fact, it was awful trying to act if there was no contact." (Mailer, p. 172.)

Male desire validates her otherwise meaningless and shattered existence -- and male desire was already a fleeting thing as Ms. Monroe neared forty. Miller was subject to destruction by the House Unamerican Affairs Committee which gave him a brief reprieve to go to London.

Marilyn Monroe's ability to make "contact" with men -- the only kind of human contact that she was taught to believe mattered -- was fading so she was fading. Pills and alcohol were pain control.

Miller was married to the most stunning-looking woman in the world, a "star" who was a prisoner of her appearance, whose intellect was denigrated by others and never by him. Miller's male ego needed to be sacrificed as he was deprived of his livelihood because of his political beliefs. Miller (rightly) refused to cooperate with the thugs in Washington. Monroe applauded him for his courage and, happily, would have shared his fate.

Miller could not leave his swagger and ego behind or discard it completely. This is tragedy. If there is one thing we need less of in the world, then it is male ego. No man could have been "Mr. Monroe" in 1956, much less one of the greatest playwrights in the English language whose genius was never doubted by his wife. Loyalty and respect from women I love is enough for me. I don't care what New Jersey's frauds and morons think of me. I want the torture files, Mr. Rabner. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

The loss of a child, after several "alleged" and hidden abortions, also of the one true and meaningful love that transcended her physical attributes was too much for Monroe after a dismal childhood with an alcoholic and insane mother, and a missing father, early sexual violations, then screwing her way to the top in Hollywood as the flavor of the week.

Miller and Monroe spoke of Shakespeare and Joyce -- yes, Marilyn read a lot and was very bright. Miller's absence was like a death. In Miller's eyes, Marilyn the artist and sensitive woman allowed herself to feel and could endure her great pain, placing on screen a magnificent and heart-breaking performance in her husband's film-script and movie: "The Misfits." Please see "The Misfits" and notice the symbol of a broken stallion that is both Miller/Monroe and their love.

Monroe was a good actress who was a great film star; Olivier was a great actor who was a fine film star. American acting is all earth; British acting is all air.

Finally, what Marilyn Monroe received only for a little while -- which the lady named "Marilyn" in my life, along with very few others, receives for my lifetime -- is love that allows, I hope, for true -- if painful -- vision:

"The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing. In responding to a loss with anguish, we are grasping our love. The love is not some separate fact about us that is signaled by the impression; the impression reveals the love by constituting it. Love is not a structure in the heart waiting to be discovered; it is embodied in, made up out of, experiences of suffering. ..."

Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 267-268 (emphasis in original).