Released no doubt to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Monroe's death, this new Netflix documentary film relied largely on audio tapes made back in 1982 by British journalist Anthony Summers with several people who either were friends, associates or colleagues of the ill-fated actress. These tapes were made by him as the background to a high-profile L A. Court case of the time which sought, no doubt under public interest if not pressure, to ascertain once and for all, the reason or reasons for her death. That verdict was the same then as that reached twenty years previously, i.e. That Monroe had died of an accidental overdose, but just like the JFK assassination or even the death of Princess Diana, speculation and conjecture still surround her death today.
Naturally however, to pad out its running-time I suspect, we get a potted history of Marilyn's life and career up to the point of her passing. Although mostly known to me anyway, it was still interesting to see contemporary news footage of her and if you think that today's paparazzi are uncaring and invasive, just get a load of the press mobbing her and inconsiderately pressing her for a comment even as she's leaving an asylum where she'd just been treated for something of a breakdown.
We get the familiar story of her abandoned childhood and Hollywood breakthrough in John Huston's "The Asphalt Jungle" feature from 1950, the short-lived marriages to baseball star Joe De Maggio and playwright Arthur Miller, her aspirations to be a serious actress in attending the Strasberg method-acting school and finally her fateful, at least so it's argued here, entanglement with the Kennedy brothers, one the President and the other the Attorney General of America.
The film at least draws a very clear conclusion but of course it's both controversial and speculative. The director's technique of having the verite audio-tapes with long-dead interviewees like Huston and Billy Wilder amongst many others, lip-synced by actors in reenactments, I must admit I found strange and off-putting, especially when used with fuzzy out-of-focus shots of the actors themselves reciting their lines, There are surely more than enough images of Monroe to act as a backdrop to just playing the audio on its own.
Also interspersed throughout the movie were carefully selected tapes of the actress herself speaking in her own voice, some from the private collection of her last psychiatrist, but these are too often taken out of context just for effect. At one point we hear her talking about the pursuit of truth almost as if she's foreseen her own death which struck me as bizarre and certainly contrived. Strange and inconsistent too not to follow-through by having an actress lip-synch Monroe's own words as every other interviewee in the film was, even if I disagreed with this particular device. In the end, it was difficult not to come to the conclusion that the film merely served to feed the Marilyn-obsession of Summers himself and that the director should have exercised a lot more objectivity.
Me, I'm not convinced this film served its subject well. Yes, it put a different spin on her death of which I hadn't been aware and gave me some pause for thought, but overall I found this production to be rather slipshod, sensationalist and almost trashy at times in its execution.
Goodbye Norma Jean, but after this, I still don't think I knew you at all.
