thoughts on My Week with Marilyn/The Descendants

My Week with Marilyn

I saw this almost a week ago and haven't felt like writing about it. After thinking about it a little, though, I think I get it, even though I didn't much care for it. Basically, we all know those people who the world seems to revolve around: other people will put up with things from them that they wouldn't put up with from anyone else, and if they ask you to do something, you drop everything to do it. Their attention makes you feel special. However, if you are someone who doesn't see what everyone else sees in this person, you are just exasperated by the lengths that others are willing to go to for them.

Marilyn Monroe was one of those people that the world revolved around, according to this movie. The problem, for me, is that I didn't quite get why. I don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, which is my own fault, I guess; however, the movie doesn't let us know a lot else. This is partly because she apparently remained a mystery to a lot of people, including the film's main character; however, what we learn about her over the course of the film wasn't really enough for me. Additionally, everyone in the film talks about what a good performer she is when she is at her best, and how she lights up the screen; Michelle Williams didn't really sell me on that. I will admit that I've never really cared for Michelle Williams and was maybe predisposed against her, but either way, I just didn't find the movie all that interesting.

The Descendants

There is a moment in this movie where George Clooney's character, Matt, tells his daughter, Alex (played by Shailene Woodley from Secret Life of the American Teenager), that her mother is going to die. She has been in a coma for a few weeks, and it has been determined that she will never wake up, and that they should turn off the machines keeping her alive. He tells Alex this while she is swimming in the pool in their backyard, and when he tells her, she reacts by ducking underwater and bursting into tears. A few moments later, she yells at him, "Why did you have to tell me when I was in the pool?"

This is a movie that is largely involved with the giving and receiving of bad news. On a few occasions, this telling is planned in advance and done very carefully. More often, however, it either just comes out (as in the previously described scene), or is said at least partly in anger, as when Alex tells Matt that her mother, Elizabeth, was cheating on him; Matt responds to this by pulling on the first pair of shoes he can find and sprinting down the street to his best friends' house, where he demands to know what they know and hurls the news that his wife is dying at them. It is these moments, the moments where characters are told bad news and we see them react, immediately and emotionally, that ring the most true for me in the movie. It made me recall the times in my own life when I've received bad news, and how it never happens at the "right" place and time. It just happens wherever you are at the time.

That's what I really liked about this movie-- that for as much as this movie is about dealing with the death of a loved one, it acknowledges that this horrible event doesn't erase anything else that's going on in your life at the time. The family's sadness over Elizabeth's death is mixed up with their anger over her infidelity. Her death also happens at the same time that Matt and his cousins are trying to decide who to sell a valuable piece of land to, or whether to sell it at all. Additionally, her death doesn't change the fact that Matt and Elizabeth hadn't been happy for a long time, or that Alex and her younger sister Scottie both have their own lives and issues. This movie is about dealing with saying goodbye to Elizabeth in the midst of all that.

Two small things that bothered me: Matt waits until he has told literally everyone else that Elizabeth is dying before he tells ten-year-old Scottie; when she is eventually told, the actual words come from a woman who I assume is the hospital's grief counselor, not him, and we don't even get to hear most of what the grief counselor says. Every moment that he didn't tell her, I got more and more uncomfortable, and I kept thinking she was going to find out accidentally, or react really violently when she did find out. Her actually finding out is pretty anticlimactic. I was also bothered by a character named Sid, a stereotypical dumb surfer dude who is friends with Alex and who is with the family throughout most of the film. He also has a knack for saying incredibly inappropriate things. I guess he was there for comic relief, and to give us the perspective of someone less close to the situation. I still didn't think he was all that necessary.

Regardless, I liked the movie a lot, for the most part. I'd recommend it.