“What am I; meat? Room service?” says Marilyn as she’s manhandled by the CIA down a hotel corridor to provide ‘relief’ for a President Kennedy deeply embroiled in the Cuban Missile Crisis in his fetching cream corset. As he discusses manoeuvres with an uncredited opponent on the phone he encourages Marilyn to get down to business. Romantic it is not.
Commodification of sexual desire, even with the most beautiful woman in the world, it most certainly is.
This film deals with the packaging of Marilyn Monroe as every man’s greatest fantasy. As a studio asset and, yes, a piece of meat to be fed to the baying hounds as often as possible.
And Andrew Dominik portrays these hounds in several slo-mo ultra grainy, high contrast scenes where Marilyn is hustled through crowds of admirers, although they seem more like hunters, of middle aged men with big bloated mouths, sweating, grimacing, howling. It’s horror incarnate. It’s Eraserhead on steroids. It’s frankly magnificent.
This is what’s making people hate this magisterial movie. It ain’t pretty, bubbly Marlyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to the President all coy and boo boop de doo. It’s the REAL Marilyn – actually, it’s the real Norma Jeane, drug addled, abused, raped, stripped naked (literally and metaphorically again and again), denied the child she so cherishes. Bullied by dominant, possessive, trophy hunting husbands (apart from the beautiful Arthur Miller played, like a ray of sunshine in the midst of Marilyn’s tempest, by Adrien Brody). Although, the trauma starts not at the hands of men but through her mother’s psychotic behaviour in Norma Jeane’s childhood.
Her early relationship, in a menage a trios with Cass Chaplin and Eddie Robinson Jr (the sons of their famous fathers), is important as Cass takes a key role as the movie develops. It’s sexy but dangerous, happy but formidable and it sets the pace for the objectification of Marilyn (Norma).
The haters hate this because, like Spencer last year, the gauze has been removed from the camera, denying the soft focus of Norman Jeane’s tortured life and revealing the reality and it makes them uncomfortable.
I, on the other hand, think this is a masterpiece of film making, all that Andrew Dominik has hinted at in the past, brought together in a searingly great pot pourri of styles (with substance) and storytelling of the highest order. It’s surreal in places, it shape shifts constantly from black and white to colour from full frame to square frame. It’s graciously wrapped in the in and out beauty of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis at their most mesmerising.
It may be fictionalised, a reimagining of Monroe’s life that was initially novelised by Joyce Carol Oates, but we all know it’s really true.
And, to cap everything, it’s got Ana De Armas at its core. No, not at its core. At its heart.
I’m not a big fan of impersonation movies, but I’ll make an exception here.
De Armas looks nothing like Marilyn in real life, (she’s a dark haired Latin American woman to start with) but, in a way, this is part of the movie’s magic because Marilyn looked nothing like Marilyn too. Marilyn was a disguise, the real person beneath, Norma Jeane, was no blonde bombshell, no sex siren.
De Armas is nothing short of breathtaking in this role, all whispery seduction one moment, raging diva the next, breaking down in a third. She reveals Monroe’s hidden depths in a wonderful dialogue with Arthur Miller in which she unearths his first love in the script of a new play and using Chekov’s Natasha as a reference point.
Miller is smitten.
We all are.
She effortlessly moves through every shade of Marilyn’s personality triumphing at her most beautiful, but equally stunning us at her lowest points (and there are many).
This movie is a tough watch. It’s not chocolate box in any way whatsoever. But it’s a celebration of cinematic skill, especially Chayce Irvin’s mesmerising photography (he’s shot Beyonce before) of metaphor, of surrealism, of art, of beauty, of passion and I absolutely loved every second of its bulky 2 hrs 46 minutes.
Bravo Andrew Dominik, Bravo Ana De Armas, Bravo Netflix.
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