Documentary crowds Marilyn Monroe out of frame
The point is made early in the wellintended documentary Love, Mari
lyn that more than 1,000 books have been written about Marilyn Monroe.
The implied message is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to say anything new about the legendary blond actress.
Do any fresh revelations or insights remain, a half century past Monroe’s overdose death at age 36?
New York documentarian Liz Garbus believes there are, found in a cache of old diary entries, personal notes, letters, poems and recipes (roast chicken, anyone?) that had long collected dust in storage.
Much of the material has already released been in print form, through
and other journals, and Garbus attempts the trickier task of bringing it to the screen. How do you breathe life into scrawls and scribbles?
Her way into the material is to have actors both young and old to declaim it, as if they were auditioning for parts in Shakespeare plays. So we get the likes of Viola Davis, Marisa Tomei, Uma Thurman, Lili Taylor, Lindsay Lohan, Elizabeth Banks and Glenn Close voicing the Marilyn parts, some more empathically than others.
Adrien Brody, Ben Foster, Paul Giamatti, David Strathairn and more speak the “lines” of Monroe’s male attendants and admirers, among them husband Arthur Miller, directors Billy Wilder and George Cukor and author Norman Mailer. Everyone appears on camera, usually in front of Monroe’s blown-up prose, which is filled with scratch-outs, marginalia and exclamation marks.
It’s a bold but ultimately wearying conceit, because it’s hard to focus on Monroe’s own “voice” — the stated purpose of the doc — when so many others are seeming to speak for her. She gets crowded out of the frame. The muddle is made worse because Garbus hedges her bets by also including much standard biopic stuff: archival newsreel and film clips, plus interviews with friends, associates and observers. Information about Monroe’s hopes and fears (“I am always alone”), her determination to succeed (“Maybe one day opportunity will knock”) and her studied development of the breathy voice, ingenue eyes and sexy wiggle are all presented as revelations.
They’re not, although anyone completely new to the Marilyn Monroe story may appreciate the chronicle of her thrilling climb and tragic tumble.
Garbus fared better in past docs, such as Bobby Fischer Against the World, telling stories about people who we don’t already know too well.
With Love, Marilyn, her all-too-familiar subject gets drowned out in a whirlwind of other voices.