Preview: My Week With Marilyn

R for uncanny celebrity impersonations, sexy hip wiggles, charming reminders of how chaste the 1950s definition of “sexy” was

Release Date: November 23, 2011

Long before she was the only lyric anyone remembers from “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and long before Michelle Williams got an inevitable Oscar nomination for portraying her, Marilyn Monroe was a real person.

My Week With Marilyn looks past the myth of celebrity, past the playful winks and bathtubs scenes, past the risque jokes that aren’t all that clever but which are enough to slay a room of undersexed British journalists, past the manipulation and the vulnerability and the vulnerability-as-a-form-of-manipulation, to see Marilyn Monroe for what she truly was: blonde.

The film also speaks to the greatest anxiety of the American male: That British men are just more appealing. Why else would the most desirable woman of the 20th century go cavorting with a random clerical assistant from London? And of course he’s named – as he would be – Colin. It’s hard to believe, but two centuries after the American revolution, the American man is still losing that fight. ~Ben Orlin