Michelle Williams was amazing in "Blue Valentine", as was Ryan Gosling. She has a knack for conveying a raw vulnerability, the kind I would liken to a doe walking in the woods while a hunter is watching, sniper window at the ready. She is a master at this vulnerability, and it is authentic. But man, those posters. They just are blatantly Michelle Williams Acting as Marilyn Monroe, that finger in the mouth. Ick, so contrived. I don't have to watch the film to know she didn't inhabit the character at all, because she was miscast.
Marilyn was a sex icon, and always will be in a different way than Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor, or Jane Fonda, as she was immortalized before her time. But you don't become a sex icon on vulnerability alone. My impression is the former small-town girl Norma Jean was tough, brassy, saucy, lethal, and intelligent, all rolled into one at her core. Vulnerable and unbalanced are really just surface adjectives for her appearance to the world around her and at-large. Williams does more justice to Monroe's surface view, rather than the troubled actress's inner life, especially on this freaking poster.
Christina Hendricks would have gone gangbusters on the role of Marilyn. Not only does she better fit the physicality of Marilyn, but it would have been a perfect stepping-stone for her from the character of Joan on "Mad Men". Right now (in rapt anticipation of the next season), Hendrick's character trajectory on the show has been Joan does not always win in love, but she refuses to let it keep her down. She remains a harbinger of hope for shrinking violets. Joan breaks down walls set up in place for woman during that time period of the '60s, balancing her sexuality with authority in the workplace, a rare feat. Even in current times, sad to say, her presence would probably raise some eyebrows, as her feminine curves would be construed as "wiles". But instead of using her sexuality to "win a man" so she can marry and have children, as was apropos among secretaries at the time (at least on "Mad Men"), she wields it to her advantage. Not to mention, does so with dignity, savvy, humor, and sophistication.
The resemblance is uncanny, is it not?
Sounds pretty similar to Marilyn, in a sense. Marilyn exposed herself for all of the world to see, comment on, and judge her identity, which I daresay is brave, if nothing else. She could not preserve her self-identity in it all, but who's to say she didn't try? Rendering her as unbalanced and needy, with self-descrutive vices, is both simplistic and disappointing. It's a cheap way to expose her vulnerability within the character of a film. Award-winning film, apparently, nevertheless. Marilyn was once a real person, not just an idea simmering in the cultural lexicon, of which there are plentiful derivatives, one in particular Lindsay Lohan. Lohan more and more seems as if trying to emulate Marilyn in her downward spiral, eyeing the cameras on court dates, while burying her inner life deeper and deeper past day-to-day reality.
And why in the world was this film nominated for a comedy on the Golden Globes? Just goes to show, if anything, The Weinstein Company is an ace at making pretty good films and doing some pretty damn good business. And at entertaining Hollywood-borne archaic notions of women as talent in the meanwhile.
