“My Week with Marilyn,” Music from the Motion Picture (Sony Classical)
With hindsight, and all of the mythologizing that has accrued, we look at Marilyn Monroe a lot differently now than when she was alive. Did we consider her a tragic figure when we first saw here in “Some Like It Hot”? As David Thomson writes, “one substantial recognition came out of her career: even if morbidly, the public was made aware of the special destruction that may attend a star.”
“My Weekend with Marilyn” is set during the summer of 1956 when the actress (played by Michelle Williams) was in England to make “The Prince and the Showgirl” with Laurence Olivier. After Marilyn’s husband – Arthur Miller at this point, not Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio – leaves for the States, an assistant on the movie set named Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) gets to play his country’s host in a big way. The price he pays for his hopeful expectations is a broken heart – a strikeout and a rejection slip all in one.
The score is sort of divvied up between Alexandre Desplat and Conrad Pope, the latter also having arranged, orchestrated, and conducted the music. Desplat, however, is credited with “Marilyn’s Theme,” which is performed by no less a virtuoso than pianist Lang Lang. This wistful theme reemerges again and again, and so does Lang Lang.
Williams sings a couple of tracks – Irving Berlin’s “Heat Wave,” Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic” – that evoke Marilyn’s fragile and dreamy sensuousness, and the record is also dotted with other tunes from the era, Dean Martin and “Memories Are Made Of This” and Nat King Cole crooning “Autumn Leaves.” In case anyone here has forgotten, Cole had one of the best voices on the planet.
The album is laced with bittersweet moments – and the music is frequently somber: Much of the score sounds like we’re in a funeral parlor. The balloons and the champagne are in the other room.
Not overly sentimental, yet saturated with melancholy, Desplat and Pope have conjured up a sense of loneliness and insecurity behind the façade of bright lights and Hollywood glamour. ER
