Movie Box Review

Harvey Weinstein has two movies on the way in the next couple of months featuring actresses who are presumptively in line for Oscar consideration: The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, and MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.  Let's take a look at the signals Mr. Weinstein may be sending out about which movie he's favoring, based on his actions in connection with both films yesterday.  On Sunday night, Weinstein personally introduced Marilyn to the packed house at Grauman's Chinese for the AFI Film Festival, and brought Williams with him, even though she was due in Chicago at 4AM this morning for a very early call on her new Wizard of Oz movie.  He also had a Steinway grand piano schlepped to the front of the Chinese just so celebrated concert pianist Lang Lang could come in for 5 minutes (before rushing to his own LA Philharmonic concert downtown) and play the theme music from the movie for the gathered crowd.

Oh, and he postponed the opening of The Iron Lady until virtually the last possible date it's even eligible for Oscar consideration, December 30.

So the fair-haired child is clearly Williams and My Week With Marilyn (although where Best Picture is concerned, it's probably still The Artist).  And although it would be foolish to dismiss any work by Meryl Streep sight unseen, it's fair to say that she'll have her hands full trying to unseat Williams, whose work is quite dazzling, an astonishing channeling of Monroe that is without doubt one of the thrilling performances of the year.

My Week With Marilyn is based on the real-life recollections of Colin Clark (played in the film by Eddie Redmayne), an assistant director on the unexceptional 1956 comedy The Prince and the Showgirl that starred and was directed by Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).  Clark became the liaison between the production and the very difficult and troubled Monroe, and for a short time he was her confidante and perhaps more (the movie is a bit ambiguous on this score).  In the course of this time, he fell in love both with show business and with the ultimately unattainable star.

The narrative track of Marilyn is actually quite similar to the 2008 Me and Orson Welles.  In that one, Zac Efron was the young innocent learning about the theatre from a legend (Christian McKay as Welles), as well as about the vagaries of love from someone older and more experienced (Claire Danes).  Although McKay gave a superb performance, the movie went nowhere, probably because sadly the Welles name doesn't mean much to audiences anymore.  Marilyn Monroe, though, has retained her cultural fascination (not to mention that she looked a lot better than Welles in a tight dress), and with Williams' remarkable performance, Marilyn has a much better chance of breaking through.  

Screenwriter Adrian Hodges and director Simon Curtis both come out of British TV, and their work is professional and compelling without being exciting:  along his way, young Colin meets his share of colorful movie people like Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike (to much better advantage than as Hoover's mother in J. Edgar), Dominic Cooper as Monroe's producer Milton Greene, Toby Jones as her publicist Arthur Jacobs (he would go on to produce the original Planet of the Apes movies, among others), Julia Ormond as Olivier's then-wife Vivien Leigh, Zoe Wanamaker as Monroe's acting coach Paula Strasberg, and so on.  He's forced into high-pressure situations and has to prove himself.  There's a "nice girl" (Emma Watson, in her first substantial non-Hermoine role) for him to like but abandon for the sake of Marilyn.  Colin is dazzled, and then hurt, and finally stronger for the experience.  All of this is pretty much a by-the-book coming of age tale.

The movie's portrayal of Monroe, too, doesn't have any particular surprises.  She's insecure, voraciously needy, in love with her then-new husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and even more with the high culture he represents (this was the time when she was thinking of appearing in "The Brothers Karamazov" on Broadway), but not loyal to him.  (Nor is he to her, in the way that counts--he's writing cruel "fiction" based on her.)   She's untrained and essentially unskilled as an actress, but the camera ravishes and is ravished by her.  One of the sharpest lines of the script notes that she hoped working with Olivier would turn her from a movie star into a real actress, and Olivier hoped working with her would change him from a great actor into a star, and neither was likely to happen.  (They didn't; The Prince and the Showgirl was a flop.)

All of this is familiar Monroeiana, but it's never been captured with such conviction and complexity as Williams conveys in her portrayal.  She doesn't do an imitation; her breathy voice and mannerisms suggest, rather than duplicate, Monroe.  (Although the recreations of actual scenes from Prince and the Showgirl are unerring.)   It's so easy to overdo Monroe, but Williams never falls into that trap --one of the movie's best moments has her asking if she should do "Marilyn" for a gathered crowd and then launching into her own trademark gestures--and instead suggests the troubled, increasingly desperate mind behind the eyes of the icon.

Williams' performance is the real thing, and if the movie that surrounds her doesn't quite rise to her level, it's still a pleasure to watch.  The pace is brisk at 99 minutes, the hair, costume and make-up staffs have done an marvelous job of turning Williams into Marilyn Monroe, and other technical credits are first-rate as well (it's a particularly nice touch to see how Ben Smithard's cinematography changes to match the actual 1950s color look of The Prince and the Showgirl in scenes from the film-within-the-film).  

My Weekend With Marilyn may only be a vehicle, but what a driver!  It's an entertaining, reasonably intelligent and well-crafted film that preserves one of the year's jewel performances at its center.

Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and yet there's not a moment in it as exciting--let alone as much fun--as last night's paintball episode of "Community."   Now "Community"s paintball episodes are completely awesome, so that's a fairly high standard... but still. 

Thor isn't the worst superhero picture to come our way (remember the Fantastic Four movies?  the Joel Schumacher Batmans?  Superman:  The Quest for Peace?), but it may be the most underwhelming.  Marvel presumably hired Kenneth Branagh to direct because of his association with Shakespearean drama (it certainly wasn't because of his action movie chops), and under his helm the picture presents itself with extreme seriousness--the hero's backstory is interweaved with Norse mythology, which here takes place in an Asgard located in outer space, and Thor himself, not a mere immigrant from his planet a la Superman, is essentially a god.  The Asgard scenes take place in massive, fake-looking sets that look like they were re-lit from Cecil B DeMille's Egyptian palaces in The Ten Commandments, with equally phony CG landscapes that seem modeled after the matte paintings in David Lynch's version of Dune.  In case that wasn't enough, no less than Anthony Hopkins was brought in to roar his way through the role of the one-eyed King Odin, father of Thor (if I was hearing correctly, he's called "Allfather," although it's not clear if that's his convenient last name or a salute to his parenting skills).  

As written by Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne (from a story by J. Michael Straczynski and Mark Protosevich), the Asgard section of the tale gives Thor (Chris Hemsworth) an evil brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston)--we know Loki is evil because he's made up to look like Richard E. Grant (unlike Thor's robustly Aryan good looks) and he turns out to be adopted--who plots with the nearby ice people (kinged by Colm Feore behind a lot of digital effects) to take advantage of Thor's impulsive arrogance and depose Odin, banish Thor to Earth and take over the throne.  But not to worry, Thor still has 4 warrior buddies on Asgard--a fat one, a hot babe, an inexplicably Asian one, and one who looks oddly like the young Kenneth Branagh--to protect his interests.  Meanwhile, back in banishment (specifically New Mexico), Thor crashes to Earth right in the path of spunky, lovely young scientist Jane (Natalie Portman, this having been shot before she knew Black Swan was about to change her career), her kooky sidekick Darcy (the criminally underused Kat Dennings, from Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist) and mentor Erik (Stellan Skarsgard, Hollywood's go-to professor).  This will come as a shock, but spunky scientist Jane finds herself falling for the hunky god-in-exile, while he learns a handy lesson about appreciating humanity and accepting self-sacrifice, which is useful because--did I mention?--only when Thor shows he is worthy can he regain possession of his magic hammer Mjolnir, which apparently has been watching "Camelot" on Starz and is stuck immovable in a rock until such time as a worthy god can retrieve it.  And since this is a Marvel movie and everything has to lead to their megafranchise Avengers picture next year, Clark Gregg from Iron Man (and eventually Samuel L Jackson) are lurking around, although how Thor will connect with SHIELD is left unclear in this installment.

And you know what?  All of that, as dumb and dense as it is, would be fine if the movie were just enjoyable (try talking yourself through the storyline of Batman Begins one day).  Branagh does some things right--he gets humor from Hemsworth, Portman and Dennings in the fish-out-of-water New Mexico scenes, and Hiddleston is a fine villain once you realize he's going to act like the "trusted" family friend in 1940s movies who turns out to be a Nazi spy.  There's also one genuinely cool CG moment when a giant robot Loki's sent to Earth manages to reverse itself back-to-front without turning around.  But Branagh doesn't know how to edit the action sequences--he completely muffs the big moment when Thor regains his powers--and the script, which probably went through many more writers than those credited, dribbles off at the end, so the final confrontation between Thor and Loki has so little impact you expect the real climax to follow.  (The 3D, as increasingly expected, is virtually without impact.)  Even the coda scene (you have to sit through all 10 minutes of credits to get there, unlike Fast Five, which mercifully lets the audience go after the first couple of minutes) delivers less of a set-up for the next chapter than you'd hope.

Thor's florid tone is completely different from the more sophisticated, character-based wit of the Iron Man series (not to mention those of the two failed Hulk movies), which makes one wonder just how they're planning to bind them all together for The Avengers.  But that's next summer's problem.  The good thing about summer blockbusters is that they're like buses--if the first one that stops doesn't look like a comfortable ride, just wait and there'll be another.  The buses have just started to run for Summer 2011, so let's hope the vehicles to come have better engines.

(THOR - Paramount/Marvel - 117 minutes - PG 13 - Director:  Kenneth Branagh - Script: Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz, Don Payne (story by J. Michael Straczynski, Mark Protosevich) - Cast:  Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgard, Clark Gregg, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, Colm Feore, Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas, Jaimie Alexander - Wide Release)