My Week with Marilyn: Critic Reviews

Michelle Williams plays Monroe, and she's a wonder.

Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that's almost enough.

My Week With Marilyn is light fare: it doesn't pretend to offer any great insight, but it offers a great deal of pleasure and fun...

Williams may not be a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean Baker but she superbly embodies the legendary sex symbol in My Week with Marilyn.

Williams's Monroe is more vital than anything else. The actress captures Monroe's range of emotions and personae, her shifts from vulnerability to brashness.

For the 99 pleasantly strained minutes of "My Week With Marilyn,'' Williams convinces us of her Marilyn Monroe.

Shimmying stiffly in too-tight dresses, exaggerated belly padding protruding awkwardly off her modern waif frame, Williams's voice and movements reflect study but not feeling.

She is, as portrayed by Michelle Williams, a strange and beautiful alien: Unpredictable, odd, magnetic.

A dubious idea done in by Adrian Hodges's shallow script and Simon Curtis's clumsy direction.

After My Week, Monroe remains an enigma. And that isn't a failing of Williams' performance but an expression of its nuance.

It's too bad that Williams didn't have a script or director that would have given the film a better chance of attaining greatness.

It's an expertly made, intentionally minor movie, though when Monroe, doping herself with everything available, lies in bed, confused and hapless, there are depressing intimations of the end to come.

What matters is the performance by Michelle Williams. She evokes so many Marilyns, public and private, real and make-believe. We didn't know Monroe, but we believe she must have been something like this.

First-time feature film director Simon Curtis has made a minor picture about a minor picture, major talents notwithstanding.

Michelle Williams shoulders the daunting task of portraying the screen legend, and though she requires a body double with the appropriate curves, she gives a sweet and nicely vulnerable performance.

Look at how Williams goes from unconsciously being Marilyn to consciously "acting" her. Would that the entire movie were as eloquent.

In "My Week With Marilyn," Michelle Williams disappears so effortlessly into Monroe's translucent skin that the camera lens seems to fog up with desire. She's that good.

If "My Week with Marilyn" ultimately seems like a slight film, a barely disguised awards vehicle for Williams, that's probably because it is. But her performance is so engaging and complete, it's worth all the other shortcomings.

Something moved me deeply watching Ms. Williams as the tragic Marilyn, illuminating the girlish joy, erotic glamour and self-destructive suffering of a public icon who was privately a bottomless pit of need.

To the extent that Michelle Williams' multilayered interpretation of Marilyn Monroe serves as its raison d'etre, My Week With Marilyn succeeds stunningly. Otherwise, the film flits uneasily between arch drawing-room comedy and foreshadowed tragedy.

Brilliantly playing doomed '50s sex bomb Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams gets under the skin of the troubled yet vulnerable icon in a way no one else ever has.

In scene after scene, Williams "gets" Monroe - the sex appeal, the vulnerability, the sense of fear of discovery behind all that out-there sexual bravado.

Curtis occasionally takes his characters out of Pinewood, but they're never really set free, either in physical or emotional terms.

It's an easy emotional rollercoaster to put an audience through, and while Williams nails the breathy voice and flickers of doubt, her work here is never allowed to feel truly effortless.

'My Week with Marilyn': Minor film with major marketing campaign