"For Better or For Worse (and this is me at my worse)" or
"...With a Hasty Word You Can't Recall."
When Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentinecomes out on DVD in the Spring, I wouldn't be surprised if a few June weddings got cancelled. Not because it's such a depressing movie about marriage (it is!), but because it is so annoyingly accurate in depicting its scenes from a broken marriage. Not broken, really, and not sinking...but definitely floundering—one of Woody Allen's "dead sharks."
It depicts 24 hours in a marriage, complete with flash-backs of the puppyish love of the participants (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, both brave performances and both equally deserving of Oscar recognition—like love and marriage, you couldn't have one without the other*) and devoted actions that led to it. Because that is what is so painful about watching Blue Valentine—you seeboth the sour and sweet of the marriage without the glacial wearing down of feelings into numb reaction that occurred in between. The contrast between the two periods is stark, and the film jumps between them with the speed of a single edit.
He's a house painter with Peter Pan syndrome, she's a nurse who can't cure it. They have a child who adores them both, and doesn't notice the tension in the words between the two adults. They're not bad people and married with the best of intentions. But, at some point, the growing between them stopped, and the euphemism for marriage—"settling down"—has a chilling ring of complacency to it.
Love is hard work, and marriage is even harder (that is, if you do it right—says Mr. Divorcee). One cannot take the initial spark that prompted it and forget it, like a pilot light (a metaphor that Blue Valentine exploits at its ending). It must be tended and cared for and nurtured and not taken for granted. And that is one thing the romantic comedies of today's cinema rarely get right—they stop right at the beginning, making them a bit of a cheat and giving them all the validity of a Hallmark card. You look at a film like Blue Valentine, so brave in its depiction of the tough love a relationship or marriage requires, and the final shot of a typical rom-com like James L. Brooks' How Do You Know—the held framing of a now abandoned bus stop indicating that the couple are now together—looks a little hollow, like a null set (as opposed to Brooks' Spanglish, which is a bit more mature in its depiction of dedication in the face of desirable and easier choices.
One of the aspects of the film, which has hung with me for days and haunts me, is its use of delayed pay-offs. Most films these days hammer image and soundtrack together in an obvious manner to reinforce a point in case the audience doesn't get it. A bit insulting, actually. Cianfrance and his writers and actors have far more faith and build a skein of rock-solid "call-backs" that, given the perspective of the whole film—The Big Picture—creates a rich tapestry of a film. Blue Valentine, in its appropriately fractured structure, leaves things hanging, that in retrospect—a major theme of the film—connect to other incidents that shore up the situation: the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" snaps to the end-shot; Cindy's casual mentioning of a chance encounter in a liquor store that inexplicably sets Dean off is revealed to be an insensitive and cruel topic; and—my favorite—an odd protracted shot of Dean looking directly at the camera in a hospice corridor.
So, yes, it might discourage a couple of Darwin Award-winning marriages, but Blue Valentine is a raw, rewarding, intelligent film about maybe-not-so-intelligent choices, however right they may feel. It might be the pomegranate in the box of chocolates, but during this Valentine month, full of hearts and flowers and fluff on the cinema screens, it's a brave thing to say that the course of true love never runs smooth, but the path to Hell...even the one down a church-aisle...is paved with good intentions.
* Gosling was shut out of the Oscar race, which is a shame. His performance is so seeringly on the money, taking full advantage of Gosling's callow strengths as an actor, that it makes his myopic man-child of a young husband painful to watch, while not making him entirely unsympathetic. Tough trick to pull off, but Gosling makes it look easy. Sometimes, Ryan Gosling is not so good. Here, he's brilliant.
2024 Update: He took things to a toxic, pathetic extreme in Barbie, of course. And now he's in the Oscar race!
“A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs - it sucks - it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles.”
“Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you."
Peter Shaffer "Equus"
There is a sequence in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans that I found absolutely hilarious, but mine was the only laughter in the theater.
The set-up is that young Sammy Fabelman (at this point played by Mateo Zoryan) is being taken by his parents, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi (Michelle Williams) to his first movie, The Greatest Show on Earth. Sammy is worried. It will be DARK and he's scared of the dark. Father explains the technical aspects of film running as still images that take advantage of the limitations of the eye's retention—the persistence of vision—to simulate a moving image, while Mom takes the romantic view: "Movies are dreams that you never forget." Already the family lines are drawn out between the adults: one is technical, one is artistic.
But, a child wouldn't know that. Driving home, Mitzi asks Sammy "What was your favorite part?" he can't answer...he doesn't answer, still gob-smacked by that approaching train and the disaster that he witnessed before his eyes. At Hannukah, Sammy gets trains as a present—Dad explains the scale and the connections and what makes it go. But, Sammy wants to watch them table-top height to re-create that scene from the movie and sets up elaborate things for it to crash into, inevitably breaking the engine and incurring Dad's disapproval. Break things? You're supposed to FIX things!
But, Mom gets it. Sammy's trying to recreate the scene to make it less scary—he wants to understand it, control it, master it. She gets some film for Dad's movie camera so Sammy can film the train again and again, so he won't be constantly breaking trains. And he shows Mom the movie he made of the train from various angles, various ways to make a model train scary.
But, before the part where Sammy shows his little movie to his thrilled audience, there's a sequence where adult director Steven Spielberg makes an honest-to-god recreation of that "Greatest Show on Earth" crash using miniature trains, toy cars and unsuspecting Hannukah decorations using the same angles DeMille did. And it's amazing. Also funny as Hell. To think Spielberg—at 75 years old—was determined to get that sequence he was trying to make at 6 years old look as good as possible. It's hilarious. It's fun. It's poignant. It's a little brilliant in its meta-sense.
The Fabelmans is Spielberg's telling (with a canny co-script by Tony Kushner*) of the story of his childhood, the birth of his love of making movies and the death of his parents' marriage. It's a story that spans two moves—from New Jersey to Arizona and Arizona to Los Angeles—and ten years and god knows how many hours with an eye to a viewfinder, hours squinting at film through a magnifying glass and cutting and splicing it together with glue as well as graduating from 8mm home movies to 16mm presentations. Oh. He also attended school, got bullied for being Jewish, and getting his first crush...on a shiksa.
Self-indulgent? Sure. But, then you're ignoring Hemingway's maxim "write what you know." Every film-maker (or author) taps into the well of their past** If you dismiss Spielberg doing it, you dismiss Richard Linklater or Francois Truffaut. You can't sneer at The Fabelmans and extoll Cinema Paradiso. Hell, Fellini made a career out of it. Howard Hawks used metaphorical occupations to tell stories about making movies. So, self-indulgent? Sure, join the club!
But, it's a fascinating exercise and an entertaining one, too, because it is Spielberg looking at himself through the rear-view-finder, looking through the aperture and seeing himself, fixing the story where it needs to be finessed or goosed (as he always does) and looking for the tell-tale detail that resonates. Only this time, it's personal, and it's fascinating to look at Spielberg's life as he observed it (or sees it now) and into his mind, as well.
For instance, there is a clear case of imposter syndrome where Sammy Fabelman is the family chronicler, filming everything as observer, story-teller, but ultimately outsider. The revelation comes out in a sequence that could be a horror movie. At a "family conference" it is announced by Mitzi and Burt that they are splitting up—he's going to remain in L.A. for his job and Mitzi is going back to Arizona for her sanity. It is a scene of tears and tearing apart. Spielberg
cuts to a shot of Sammy watching from the stairwell while the whole
traumatic scene unfolds. Cut to a closer shot of Sammy with a look of
horror in his eyes—is it suddenly dawning on him that his family is
splintering apart? Is he reacting to his sisters' emotional trauma? No.
He is reacting to the next shot Spielberg presents: Sammy sees himself (in a
fantasy sequence, inserting himself into the scene) figuring out how to
frame the scene with his camera.
That is a frightening scene. It shows that even in the most intimate, personal, affecting scene, he is outside, objectively looking for the angles, almost dispassionately when passions are running high. What has this "hobby," this obsession done to him that he can even see himself doing that, even if it is instinctually? It's a gift and a curse. As Sammy's Uncle Boris (a florid Judd Hirsch) informs him "Art. Family. It will tear you apart!"
The movie is full of small truths, revelations large and small, that inform the color of a life. I could go on and on about details, themes, structures, performance details that inform this movie (and have influenced Spielberg's entire body of work) but that would just be robbing you of a personal experience of discovery, the individual way of connecting dots and frames. In a way, all movie-makers are communicating personally, whether they are telling their own story or somebody else's.
There is another sequence in the L.A. apartment Sammy is sharing with his father. It's very simple; disarmingly simple. Sammy comes home. Burt, soon after. Sammy is tired, frustrated, isn't getting anywhere in L.A. looking for work. The mail's on the table and there's a letter from Mitzi in Arizona, with pictures, snapshots. Does Burt want to see them? Sure.
There's then the standard Hitchcock sequence of three shots. Burt looks at the pictures. Sammy looks at Burt looking. Back to Burt, as Sammy seems him. But, the two shots of the father are not the same, obviously so, even though from the same vantage point, more or less. The first shot includes Burt looking at the pictures. Cut to Sammy looking. The next shot of Burt does not include the pictures—the camera has moved up and the ceiling of the apartment is weighing down on him. That is the shot of Sammy seeing his father's reaction to the snapshot of his absent wife—the sadness, the contemplation, the emptiness. It is SO simple, but it is importantly different, delivering a visual gut-punch you can feel and that is communicated, even if you don't recognize the shift. That is communication in its rawest, visual way, the way that make movies unique in how they tell stories. And Spielberg finds the best way, subtle and overt, to convey that to the audience (whether they recognize it as such or not).
This is why I love Spielberg movies. This is why I love movies.
The movie may not be the story of Spielberg's past, so much as it's the story of his DNA.
** Some film-makers go back to recapture their youth. Supposedly, Orson Welles made The Magnificent Ambersons because it reminded him so much of his early childhood. Fellini made Amarcord. Francois Truffaut made The 400 Blows. George Lucas made American Graffiti. Francis Coppola drew on his family life on quite a few of his films. One always gets the impression from Wes Anderson's films that he's tapping into his early years. Robert Benton made Places in the Heart. Mel Brooks produced My Favorite Year. Noah Baumbach made The Squid and the Whale. The trend seems to be gathering momentum. Alfonso Cuaron made Roma. Lee Isaac Chung made Minari. Last year, Kenneth Branagh made Belfast. Paul Thomas Anderson made Licorice Pizza.
What a World, What a World; or There is no Baum in Gilead Any movie attempting to resuscitate L. Frank Baum's "Oz" books has to deal with the series' own Wicked Witch of the West—that being M-G-M's musical version The Wizard of Oz, which had Judy Garland in it, and set the bar very high as far as expectations go (for quality that is, whereas for the box-office TWoO was not a box-office success at the time of its release and only became a classic after a couple decades worth of Thanksgiving showings on network TV). Walter Murch's attempt to take an OZ story back to its roots, 1986's Disney's Return to Oz, was an abysmal failure, although artistically it was a terrific show--but probably butted heads with too many memories for its own goodness as, for instance, the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow were not vaudevillians in theater-suits, as was the 1939 version, but looked more in line with the book's illustrations.
Sam Raimi, he of larky horror films and the Tobey MaguireSpidermen, is probably a very good choice for doing an OZ film, as he has equal qualities of sweetness and sour, where Tim Burton (the next usual suspect*) would have made the film travel heavier to the morose. Raimi'sDisney's Oz the Great and Powerful(as convoluted and punctuationally challenged a title if ever, oh ever, there was one) manages to be its own thing while bowing and occasionally scraping to the previous' yellow brick road (which is revealed, as an aside, to have potholes, which nicely sums up the movie's respect, and lack thereof). A prequel, kinda sorta to The Wizard of Oz, it starts out in a black and white box-square format (with a special effect detail amusingly violating it here and there) on a sound-staged Kansas that creepily recalls the musical version. There scam-magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is conning rubes and comely assistants alike, and taking advantage of his stage-assistant, Frank (Zach Braff). He's a jerk, only revealed to better purposes when a lost love (Michelle Williams) comes to visit to tell him she's going to marry farmer John Gale (father of Dorothy, making her mother of), and he takes the higher road, telling her she chose the better man.
But before long he's embroiled in Oz's matriarchal politics between witches Theodora and her evil sisterEvanora (Rachel Weisz), who are lording it over the Emerald City, and the witch Glinda (Williams again), who is protecting the provinces from the influence of the Big Bad City.
This troika of females all think that Oscar will bring some sort of balance to Oz, and despite himself, he's got enough answers to help Finely and China, who become devotees. Evanora is the first to see Oscar and think "there goes the neighborhood," and the plot and the make-up thickens in a battle royale between the various forces of magic, Evanora and Theodora in the Emerald City, and Glinda and Oscar and her army of tinkers, winkies and munchkins. Tinkers and winkies and munchkins. Oh my.
As Donald Rumsfeld said, you fight with the army you got. And just to show this isn't Gramma's OZ (or Louis B. Mayer's) when we get welcomed to Munchkinland this time, and the town's welcome wagoneers start into a bouncy little song with high, tight voices (provided by composer Danny Elfman), Diggs just calls the whole thing off: "Stop! Stop it!" Musical numbers are not tolerated in this more cynical fantasyland. Nor is anything approaching the good-heartedness of Baum or Fleming.
Even Glinda the Good Witch turns out to be something of a bad-ass here, far badder than in the '39 version. And that's just a little backwards because the original has an empowered little girl who saves the day, while in this one it's a man, a messiah, who must sort things out in the messy rule of a matriarchy.
This is progress?
The movie ends with some fantasy-nastiness. Glinda is captured, tortured, and made to grovel before the sisters, Oscar comes to the rescue with his own Earth-bound pyrotechnics,similar to what he's use in the future. But the movie feels very much like a movie of today—things end not with a splash of water, but a lot of impressive fireworks. You want something a little meatier, though, something that might last and impress longer, but given the Oz that will come post-prequel, there's really nothing much to do about it. The great and powerful Oz is merely a humbug, the man behind the curtain. The evil sisters will remain evil, although Evanora's fashion sense (especially regards hosiery) will take a serious hit. And Oscar will become a patriarch based on big promises with nothing much to back it up. Sounds like any politician, really. This Oz is not so magical, not so great and not so powerful. What it needs is more brains, more heart and more courage.
Yellow Brick Road? Check. Emerald City? Check. Dark Forest? Check. So...what's wrong with this picture?
Welcome back to the World of Charlie Kaufman (and yes, after all the success you can still call him "Charlie"). Kaufman's screenplays are expanded "Twilight Zone" episodes where reality is warped and woofed through the gray matter of Kaufman's mind and some basic axiom of the human condition comes shining through like sunlight through cheese-cloth.Synecdoche New Yorkis the same sort of Möbius-loop swirl like Kaufman's scripts for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Adaptation.*(and his puppet-film,Anomalisa).**And as with those scripts, you not only get the story as it stands, but also a look into the soul of Kaufman, as well. Malkovich was the story of an street-artist who dreamed of being more than a puppeteer and ended up becoming a director of another man's life--a grander-scale puppet-master. Eternal Sunshine explored relationships and the hopeless act of putting one behind you. Adaptation. was a look at obsession, disguised as Kaufman's own frustrations at trying to write a screenplay for an un-adaptable book. Synecdoche New York is another step altogether: Kaufman makes his directorial debut in this film about a director who can direct anything but his own life.
"And the Truth Is..."
"...well, like most directors, I suppose, what I really want to do is act."
Mel Gibson's Oscar speech, 1996
As life sometimes happens, when one part of your life is going great, another slides. Adele has taken Olive to Berlin for a showing of her work, and the weeks stretch into months, and Cadon can't hold his fragile state enough to have an affair with Hazel (Samantha Morton) the ticket-agent at his theater. The he gets a MacArthur grant. How's he going to spend his "genius" money? He rents a warehouse--like a monolithic Quonset hut in the middle of Schenectady, and begins a series of work-in-progress workshops, where the play will begin to take shape. But pretty soon, the play cannot be contained, and Cotard begins to wander through an increasing maze of scenarios intertwined with a phalanx of actors seeking direction and a city-scape forming inside the warehouse. He begins to lose track of his life and the play's purpose until he hires Sammy (the terrific Tom Noonan) to play himself. Sammy claims to have followed Cotard for years and says he knows the director better than he knows himself. At the time, that didn't seem like quite a stretch. For awhile the two are inseparable.
And then things start to get a little bit weird.
syn•ec•do•che (sÄ-nÄ›k'dÉ™-kÄ“) Pronunciation Key n. A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
To explain any more of the plot is to do two things: 1) Give away what's going on, and 2) explain what's going on; I can do the first, but not the second, which 1) is anathema to film criticism and 2) required of film criticism. The stew of Synechdoche New York is so rich that one can only pick a flavor or two, a passing impression, the overall emphasis, but I can't tell you what it tastes like, other than to say "I enjoyed it immensely, and I'd order this item on the menu again." I can understand why it would completely overwhelm a casual tasting or appear too rich to stomach, and I can certainly see the polarizing effect it has on those whose tastes don't run to such things.
But taste is an individual thing, and the structure of Synecdoche New York, which, in itself, is its own false-front, is a deliberate shout-out that "Nothing is real," so if you're looking for explanations of some basic matters, it's just not going to happen, because the connective tissue that would provide the answers not only isn't there, it's considered irrelevant to the task at hand, and manipulated to actually confront, confuse, and consternate. And make a joke of it.
Which I find hilarious. For instance, I love that Kaufman cast two actresses—Samantha Mortonand Emily Watson—who I find, frankly, a bit indistinguishable, and cast them as an important woman in Cadon's life and the woman who's playing her in the play. That the two actually do become indistinguishable is a wonderful joke that I, alone, might get, but I still enjoy it. That the background score for a poignant telephone conversation seems to travel over the telephone line, as well (with the same tinny sound), is a great joke, but might frustrate someone else looking for logic or reason. That Adele coughs in a voice-over might make someone throw up their hands and question why someone would consider doing that only makes me giggle. That Hazel, when taking a tour with a real estate agent, makes a comment that she's really nervous about buying a house, but really wants to take the plunge, so much so that she'll ignore that the house is on fire, and, oh by the way, the agent's son is living in the basement, only reminds me of the compromises I've made and the flaws I've overlooked in similar decision-making processes. It also says something about the character...yes (*sigh*) in a lunatic way...but I found it funny.
"And the Truth Is..."
"I thought I was President of the United States. Then when my daughter was born, I realized I was just the Secret Service."
What's interesting to me is that I have my own ceiling of "guff" in movies: I'll "take" Kaufman because the spirit in which he creates is playful, the ideas he expresses I find, if not profound, worthy of consideration (such as the over-uttered point of "SNY") and the work, and the path taken to get there, entertain me; I appreciate the journey, even if the destination disappoints.
Yet, as a recent post on David Lynch's Inland Empire made abundantly unclear (my fault: I'm sorry, I was being illustrative of my frustration with the piece and its artist) there's only so much obfuscation I can take. There is a difference between an artist being deliberately "difficult" to understand, and an artist with a point to make. If you want to confound, go into the puzzle-making business. If you want to communicate—and that means taking the chance that your message may be received and judged—make sure that you're communicating. Inland Empire had no "Rosetta Stone," not even the orientation of humor, to guide the viewer, so whatever "TRUTH" Lynch was aiming for got lost in the scene-shuffle.***One can argue about the cruel economics of the film business, but every so often an indulgent artist has to give his Muse a bracing cuppa joe, black, (and amusingly, Lynch, of all artists, should know this!) and show it where the audience is sitting.****
Which brings up the philosophical question: If a theater-troupe makes a play in an empty theater, does it make a sound
And the answer is: "Who cares?" Play on.
"And the Truth Is..."
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
Ernest Hemingway, "For Whom the Bell Tolls"
* I thought I'd posted my review of Adaptation.. Guess I was wrong. I'll post it next week....and my pissy little review of Inland Empire. ** Although nobody ever brings up his writing for "Ned and Stacey" and "The Dana Carvey Show" *** I don't make a habit of beating up on Lynch. I love 80% of his out-put, especially The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Falls, and The Straight Story. Wild At Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, pffft!
**** At the Guild 45th late show, a late-comer sat across the aisle from me, and throughout the movie we separately giggled and hooted throughout the film, laughing at the same parts. Only when the credits came up did we glance at each other and, in a perfectly synched move, raised our drink-cups in salute to the screen.
The Battle of Mrs. Miller ("Whose Side Are You On?") or "What Becomes a Legend Most?"
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on" says Prospero in "The Tempest." Prospero and Shakespeare run throughMy Week with Marilyn(the latest confection of young love and fictionalized reality—with appearance by Judi Dench—from the Weinstein Company) like Caliban, a spirit of confused form and intent in Shakespeare's play. All the revelers in Simon Curtis' film (written—especially well by Adrian Hodges) are real, based on real individuals and events, but how true they are to the source is questionable, given as they are to interpretation and expectations, and to the dreams of the participants, for whom the movies and fame is a business, an art, as well as personal obsessions.
None more so than Norma Jeane Baker, who inhabited our world and our dreams as Marilyn Monroe, a free spirit trapped in prison bars formed of klieg lights, a vessel that men poured their love and lust onto and women their princess dreams of being the most popular girl in the world. Heavy, heavy burden, that, and she bore it from the lowliest, sleeziest agent in Hollywood to Kings of the Sports World and Men of Letters. She also bore it from other film stars, who looked at her fame and wanted a piece of it (and maybe her, as well), including Sir Laurence Olivier, who insisted on casting Marilyn in his production of The Prince and the Showgirl, a trifling movie if ever there was one, despite being written by Terence Rattigan, and despite having had a success of it on the stage.
What Marilyn saw in doing the movie was obvious; she was working with the world's greatest Shakespearean actor and director on a film written by an acknowledged writer. Why Olivier wanted to do this is less so: financial success for his un-barded film; name recognition to draw the crowds for a film out of his metier; maybe he just wanted Marilyn, as so many men did, and the new bride of American playwright Arthur Miller (not the best looking guy in the world) might have provided a world to conquer for the actor who played so much ambitious Shakespearean royalty. Whatever the reason, Olivier was constantly frustrated with the fragile, neurotic actress, who had other concerns besides working with the exacting director—it was the only film she made outside of her protective home studio, 20th Century Fox, the only film she made outside of the United States, and the first film of her fledgling production company—all unique concerns that might have distracted the actress, on top of her new marriage to Miller and a hushed-up pregnancy during filming that resulted in a miscarriage.
The film that Hodges and Curtis have crafted from the events and a tell-all written about it by filmmaker Colin Clark (played by Eddie Redmayne), is one of the better ones to be made of this type. Casting has a lot to do with it. Michelle Williams is not the first person I would picture as Norma Jean, but the versatile actress manages to capture the presence of the human being at the core of the starand suggest the winsomeness that charmed so many in her orbit.
Kenneth Branagh has been linked with Olivier for most of his career, paralleling the legendary thesp by making his own film directing debut with a gritty, strapping version of Olivier's own first directorial effort of Henry V.His portrayal of Olivier might seem too easy, but there was nothing about the man that was 'easy," and Branagh has a fine time, mixing Olivier voices, accents, and mercurial swings throughout the film—his Olivier is never consistent in mood, manner or method, just as you'd expect a Master Thespian to be (he maximizes the precision of great lines like "Teaching Miss Monroe to ACT is like trying to teach URDU to a BADGER!"), but undermined with the idea that Monroe's "presence" on-screen had nothing to do with his efforts behind the camera.
Rounding out the cast are such fine performers as Toby Jones (hilariously indecent as Marilyn's publicist and future Planet of the Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs), Dench—playing a woman she once acted with, Dame Sybil Thorndike, Dougray Scott as Arthur Miller, and Weinstein go-to girl Julia Ormond as Olivier wife-partner, Vivien Leigh, as well as turns by Zoë Wanamaker, Derek Jacobi, Emma Watson, and one of my favorites, Michael Kitchen. Redmayne is fine and callow, as he's supposed to be, eyes always a little bit wide at a new turn of events in the film business, and a tentative, crooked half-smile his constant fall-back.
The script is full of great zingers about fame, fortune, the madness of the movie business, and how hard people work to make things look effortless (and on-time), as well as loads of gossipy references for "the blue-hairs." It also has a nice undercurrent that touches on fantasy and reality—hence the Prospero—and the process by which reality and the illusion of reality can really mess us up...if we believe our own "press." Sometimes the illusion of reality is nothing more than fantasy—the very stuff that dreams are made on. And the makers of fantasy are just as susceptible as the rest of us—maybe even more. My Week with Marilyn brings to the imagination such thoughts, beyond just being a tale of the Myth of Marilyn.
She did exist in reality. And her reality had little to do with her fantasy. The camera loved her and made us love her image. And that's what killed her.
Olivier and Monroe on-set and Monroe at the premiere party
