How did I engage with Marilyn in the film ‘My Week with Marilyn’?

At the start of the film, even before Marilyn is introduced we get a sense of what she is like. She is described in the first few lines as ‘the most famous woman alive’, and a ‘Hollywood siren’. This immediately makes us think that she is very successful and glamorous, and so I personally found it hard to empathise and engage with her in the start, as her lifestyle is so different to most peoples. This is the same throughout the first few scenes – they spend a lot of time and care finding her the perfect house, and considering what colours she may or may not like - she seems so idolised by everyone around her, when they haven't even met her yet, it almost makes her seem unreal, and therefore very hard to engage with.

When she first appears in the film, the sense of power we feel she has grows. The crowd is focused on Olivier and Vivien, but as soon as Marilyn's plane lands, everyone turns from them to her - enforcing the superiority we feel she has. 

When Marilyn is first introduced to the film they are shooting, her character becomes more confusing, and the perceptions we had about her from the start of the film begin to be challenged. When she’s on the film set, she seems to struggle a lot with her lines, relying heavily on her acting coach Paula to help her get through each scene whilst remembering her lines. This sense of her having faults is enforced again when Olivier begins to insult Marilyn, and she leaves the set visibly upset. I think introducing the sensitive and more flawed side of her allows everyone to empathise with her more, as we finally get the sense that she is a human being who struggles with things, just as we do.

The day she spends with Colin further shows us the human side of her. To anyone who didn’t know who she was, the two of them would look like a completely normal couple having a day out – this part is the most important when finding a side of Marilyn we can relate to, as she isn’t having specific troubles with her acting that none of us have experienced, and she isn’t being put across as some famous, untouchable Goddess.

However, when Marilyn invites Colin to her house, in the part where he enters through the window, her problems become known as being a lot more complicated than is portrayed at the start – when she says she is having a miscarriage, and she tells Colin she wants to forget everything, at that point in the film I felt her problems were much too deeply rooted and unknown to the viewer for me to empathise with her.

Overall, I didn’t really find it all that easy to empathise with Marilyn. I think on the surface she just seemed to struggle with some features of acting sometimes, despite being a great actor, but as you get further into the film, her problems become too much for the average viewer to understand and relate to immediately. We do empathise with her sometimes, but I feel like her character is overall too complex for us to completely relate to.