Mirror Image: Method and Theatricality

I love these kind of movies about movies, especially about filmmaking of yore and even more so, as here, when the film-within-the-film, "The Prince and the Showgirl" (1957), is also reflexively about performance--even if the gofer of a third assistant director who's the chronicler here has no idea what the film is actually about, describing it simply as "the lightest of comedies," let alone whatever his amateur psychologizing is for Marilyn Monroe. It's the clash of American Method film acting and British repertoire theatricality, as represented by both Monroe and Laurence Olivier and their respective characters in their film.

True to form, Olivier never seemed to quite grasp what made Monroe such a better film actor than him, blaming it on something "natural," even referring to her as a model instead of an actress, and as he nevertheless continued in his Old World Shakespearean ways. The funny thing about Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh's representations of the two is that while Monroe was the one who came across without affectation on screen, as though "playing herself" when in fact Monroe the star was but another movie role, and Olivier the one who buried himself under makeup and prosthetics into a character removed from himself or his own, cigarette-branded star persona, Williams and Branagh turn this around. Williams, indeed looking little to nothing like Monroe, wears the stuffed bra and hip pads in an approximate characterization of the sex symbol's curvaceous and bosomy hourglass figure while affecting the vulnerable sexpot type expected of the Monroe persona. Branagh, meanwhile, doesn't necessarily look anything like Olivier, either, or act or talk like him, but nobody cares, so there's very little by contrast in him impersonating Olivier.

Still, this is genius casting. I don't know whether Williams particularly subscribes to Method acting or not, but she certainly sought indie-cred roles that tend to be considered more artistically respectable after her "Dawson's Creek" days, being the only one of that foursome to manage an impressive acting career after that teen TV soap opera wrapped. Moreover, her late ex-lover was one of the most notorious Method actors, Heath Ledger. This was even the butt of the joke, albeit not advertised as such after Ledger's death, of Robert Downey Jr.'s role in "Tropic Thunder" (2008). Gay monks instead of gay cowboys, the film, "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) during the shooting of which Williams and Ledger's relationship began.

And, then, nobody but Branagh should play Olivier. The former has made a career out of reincarnating that of the latter. He's the guy who threw out even Olivier's sops to film as another art form and just filmed all of "Hamlet" (1996), although since then he has, for the worse, moved more towards trends in personal filmmaking. His overrated "Belfast" (2021) being almost unwatchable in its self-indulgence. "Too sentimental," as Olivier's Prince would've said, "too American." But, it works here because of the reversal: Branagh/Olivier becomes the Method actor and Williams/Monroe resorts to repertoire despite the characters' protestations to the contrary. Williams and Branagh deserved their Oscar nominations and other honors here.

As for the rest of "My Week with Marilyn," it gives short shrift to Olivier's marriage to Vivien Leigh, the actress who played the showgirl part on stage, and from what I've read their marriage was more unpleasant than that represented here. They were divorced in a couple years, and talk of ridiculously rosy postscript text in this one--Monroe next made "Some Like It Hot" (1959) and everyone lived happily ever being the gist. The entirety is a contradiction in establishing that Monroe's star persona was an act, yet she still is the sexpot in the eyes of the infatuated male protagonist. Something of the antithesis, perhaps, of that actual Arthur Miller play of a not-so-veiled account of his marriage to Monroe, "After the Fall." As much I enjoy films about filmmaking and classic cinema, too, I'm not so fond of sidelong-glance biopics. They tend to be wrong in both the particulars of the subject and in being obtuse in the way to go about it, as if we need a boring filter to identify with and to see through the eyes of to what's actually interesting, to the real star. A story of Monroe as told by some dude and that suffers by being too much about him. Maybe the books this is based on are better, but this doesn't make me want to read them, as everything interesting in it is despite or in spite of his character. One bonus of "The Prince and the Showgirl" is that at least Olivier didn't make that mistake. It's like the box of "Olivier," just give us a real cigarette.