Playing real people: Marilyn and Maggie

There is a type of movie comedy that we call the Babysitting An Overgrown Child category. In this kind of movie an entertainment industry newbie is assigned to look after an unbalanced celebrity, with hilarious and/or touching results. Earlier entries include My Favorite Year (Peter O’Toole as flamboyant boozehound movie actor) and Get Him to the Greek (Russell Brand as flamboyant rock star who was more interesting as a junkie). In Simon Curtis’s My Week With Marilyn, the celebrity is the spectacularly sexy, spectacularly famous and spectacularly insecure Marilyn Monroe. She is played by Michelle Williams, who is none of the above, but who makes up for the lack by being an extremely talented actress.

Williams does not stop at impersonating Marilyn as other actresses have done. She does not let the distinctive walk, the little girl voice, or the prosthetic curves do her job. Instead she finds the humanity of Monroe and raises her above the beautiful basket case caricature she’s been relegated to. It’s a brilliant, touching, complex performance, and if I hadn’t been rooting for Meryl Streep I’d say give her the Oscar now.

In the movie based on a memoir by Colin Clark, we see her through the eyes of the 23-year-old Clark (the unusual-looking, lovely Eddie Redmayne), a scion of Britain’s cultural elite who gets a third assistant director (as in gofer/alalay) job at Laurence Olivier’s production company. Naturally he is smitten with Marilyn Monroe, who acts the “little girl lost” but is well aware of her effect on men.

Monroe’s director, the famed thespian Olivier, may have entertained fantasies of seducing her (or being her), but hours into the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl he’s ready to wring her beautiful neck. She is always late, she can’t remember her lines, she is plainly terrified. In short, she is hell to work with. In an inspired bit of casting Olivier is portrayed by Kenneth Branagh. (Ralph Fiennes had been cast in the part, but withdrew to make Coriolanus.) Branagh does not look like Laurence Olivier at all, but in his movie debut he invited comparison by producing, directing, adapting and starring in one of Olivier’s signature pieces, Henry V.

Meryl Streep as The Iron Lady: Meryl’s Maggie is never pathetic. In triumphant times, walking into 10 Downing Street, or in battle mode, facing down strikers and Argentinian generals, she has iron in her spine but remains a human being.

Since that grand debut Branagh’s work has veered between the sublime (his terrifying Nazi General Heydrich in Conspiracy) and the ridiculous (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). My Week With Marilyn goes in the first category: just when you think he’s bordering on camp he tosses off a few lines of Shakespeare and you are transported. I wonder if there’s an element of self-parody in his performance.

Olivier and Monroe typified the clash between theater culture — professionals who could play Hamlet every single day for months, in all conditions and states of sobriety — and Method acting, in which all manner of psychological contortion is required to do a single scene. In the movie Olivier notes that he, the old pro, looks stagy and dead on the screen while Monroe, untrained and purely instinctive, is absolutely compelling. She glows. Quite simply, the camera loved Marilyn Monroe. She just never believed it.

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In the opening scene of The Iron Lady a fragile, possibly senile old lady goes to a grocery for a pint of milk and is surprised at what it costs. The old lady turns out to be the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, now widowed and afflicted with dementia. The milk scene is interesting because it recalls her controversial plan to end free milk for schoolchildren over the age of seven, earning her the nickname “Thatcher, Thatcher Milk Snatcher.” (Note: Most of what I know about Margaret Thatcher I learned from British punk bands, and they loathed her.)

Are the milk reference and the character’s dementia supposed to be some form of cosmic retribution? Comeuppance for a leader who is still reviled by many in the UK? If portraying Thatcher in an enfeebled state is supposed to “balance” the flashbacks in which she rises to become Britain’s first female prime minister and lead the nation through a critical period, it is unnecessarily cruel. Revile the woman by all means, show the consequences of her harsh decisions, but do not reduce her to an object of pity in order to placate some viewers.

The reason to see this movie from the director of Mamma Mia! is the Meryl Streep stamp of acting quality. Apart from the technical perfection of her performance — that voice should cause Maggie’s old enemies’ testicles to retract — there is the radiant intelligence Streep brings to every role.

Even in the character’s moments of confusion and forgetfulness Meryl’s Maggie is never pathetic. In triumphant times, walking into 10 Downing Street, or in battle mode, facing down strikers and Argentinian generals, she has iron in her spine but remains a human being. This is a woman in whom reason and emotion are constantly in conflict, and if she was not loved by all it was because she chose to think rather than to feel. Was she wrong? Perhaps history will judge Thatcher more kindly.

The highlight of the flat and tedious Academy Awards telecast was seeing Meryl Streep collect her second Best Actress trophy after a 30-year wait. With humor and grace but without the mock humility of the typical Oscar speech, she accepted it. What’s next?

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My Week With Marilyn is now showing exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4, Greenbelt 3 and TriNoma).