During the opening titles of "My Life With Marilyn", Michelle Williams as the titular movie story, performs "Heatwave" and where, in the original, Marilyn Monroe boop boops over the risque "by making my seat wave", Michelle goes for it and nails it. It is very telling, this isn't history, or bio, not truth (whatever they claim) or lies, it is a symbolic search for Marilyn Monroe. Many have tried. None have much succeeded. Dead at the age of 36, Marilyn's secret died with her.
Or maybe just this secret died with her. I'll explain it like this: if you ever meet a musician you'll be disappointed, they are monomaniacs: all that matters to them is sound and if you are not a musician you are a little besides the points. If you ever met an actor, you would be also disappointed: they are blanks waiting to be written upon and none was bigger or blanker than Marilyn Monroe. Monroe's fragility was her ephemerality: she was never there.
Norma Jean might be another matter.
"My Life With Marilyn" is a great work because in Michelle's Oscar worthy interpretation of Marilyn, she slips and hides in plain side. Somewhere, somehow, between that tiny, tumultuous, cracked persona, lay a real person, but in order to be Marilyn, she had to settle out Norma.
In 1956, Marilyn Monroe agreed to star with Sir Laurence Olivier in the film adaption of the Broadway hit movie "The Prince And The Showgirl" to be directed by Sir. Laurence. Monroe, with husband, playwrite Arthur Miller , method acting teacher Paula Strasberg and a retinue of hangers on arived in London to start filming. Meanwhile, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is assistant to the assistant director and becomes friends with Marilyn Monroe through a tumultuous week, where MM's tardiness, dropped lines, and nervousness is driving Sir Laurence bonkers. The mini-nervous breakdowns are supplanted by a coy romance between Colin and MM, that amountsto some skinny dipping and a kiss or two. Still, it was Marilyn Monroe…
It is all a little farfetched and the movie, a disappointment at the time though it stands up well, led Marilyn to "Some Like It Hot" and Sir L to "The Entertainer".
It is hard to access its truthfulness except to say that it feels emotionally accurate and everybody is excellent from Kenneth Branagth as Sir Laurence, Julia Ormond as the aging Vivien Leigh and most of all a lip trembling, tear crying, pill riddled superstar Marilyn as givien life by Michele. Perhaps what Michele does bests is turn her Marilyn on and off, it is almost a wonder that Michele could show what people were so drawn to in Marilyn. Both her self destruction and her destructiveness. As Sir Laurence notes, "When it comes to women, you're never too old for humiliation".
Musically, Michele sings Marilyn songs and pretty well as we. On the soundtrack there are lots of pop songs of the period, here a Dean Martin, there a Nat King Cole. Best of all is Marilyn singing "I Found Dream" in the bath, while Colin looks on from the back dazzled. It might never have happened but I treasure the daydream of proximity to greatness.
Movie: A
Music: B+