Michelle Williams Shines as Marilyn

Critics are positively giddy about Michelle Williams' performance in My Week With Marilyn, a new comedy based on Colin Clark's memoir about the week he spent at a cabin getaway with Marilyn Monroe. Here's what the critics are saying:

• It’s “a slyly comic meditation on stardom that owes less to screenwriter Adrian Hodges and director Simon Curtis than to the powerhouse at its center,” writes Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. “The luminous Michelle Williams goes bone-deep here.”
• Williams “is the one element that raises My Week above the pedestrian,” agrees Ty Burr of the Boston Globe. “She conveys the joy Monroe got out of the come-on and the neediness that made her afraid to stop.”
• “This film is a fragile construction. There is no plot to speak of,” writes Roger Ebert. But “it hardly matters,” because Michele Williams “evokes so many Marilyns, public and private, real and make-believe. … We’re probably looking at one of this year’s Oscar nominees.”
• But Manhola Dargis of the New York Times disagrees, concluding that Williams can’t save a script that “hews faithfully to Clark’s clichés.” The director, meanwhile, makes the mistake of putting “Williams continually into familiar Monroe poses … a strategy that undermines his efforts to turn the idol into a person.”

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