‘Secret Life’ takes new look at Marilyn Monroe
When do “legends” get to rest in peace? More than 50 years after her untimely demise, “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe” (7 p.m. today and Sunday, Lifetime) devotes two nights to one of the most overly chronicled Holly wood stars of all time.
Long linked romantically, or at least carnally, to President John F. Kennedy, the blond bombshell appears to have outlived him in the tawdry mythmaking department. While the Kennedy made-for-TV movie machine seemed to run out of steam some decades back, Monroe was artfully invoked in the 2011 feature film memoir “My Week With Marilyn,” starring Michelle Williams. She was also the subject of a fake Broadway musical in the short-lived 2012-13 NBC backstage melodrama “Smash.”
“Secret Life” doesn’t so much invoke Monroe as offer a shameless impersonation. The star (Kelli Garner) flounces around during a psychotherapy session as if auditioning for “How to Marry a Millionaire.” Poses and gestures not stolen from familiar films are like pantomimes from famous photographs. It would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.
Happily, Garner’s Monroe only offers a framing device for deeper flashbacks to the early childhood of Norma Jeane Mortenson, a precocious, intelligent and vulnerable beauty raised by a lov-- ing aunt (Emily Watson) due to the madness of the child’s mother, Gladys (Eva Amurri Martino).
After years of institutionalization, the unstable and promiscuous young Gladys emerges as a devout Christian scold (Susan Sarandon) in dowdy middle age. Those who admire creative casting should note that Martino is Sarandon’s daughter. Jeffrey Dean Morgan stars as Monroe’s second husband, Joe DiMaggio. But you’ll have to stick around to see him, Arthur Miller, JFK and the whole gang.
Fox introduces “Golan the Insatiable” (8:30 p.m., Sunday, WHBQ-TV Channel 13) to its animation block. Like many unwanted shows, it answers a question nobody was asking: What if we combined the wonder of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” with the occult horror of Sam Raimi’s 1981 shocker “The Evil Dead”? This cultural collision is curious, but not really amusing.
Aubrey Plaza (“Parks and Recreation”) provides the disenchanted voice of a lonely 9-year-old goth girl named Dylan. She’s trapped in a Minnesota town where grown-ups ta l k about t he state’s reputation for “nice,” but Dylan’s classmates trade in the usual clique-driven cruelty. After discovering a book of spells in the rat-infested cellar of her mother’s workplace, she accidentally summons the cruel god Golan (Rob Riggle, “21 Jump Street”) from a parallel dimension.
For all of his bluster, Golan is more of a glib party animal than an evil destroyer. And Dylan doesn’t actually want him to dismember and drink the blood of every pretty girl in her grammar school. But they both talk a good game.