Here's the thing: knowing this is going to be about Marilyn, we expect certain things. Dazzling beauty exuding sex, insecure film star in search of the real person; perhaps some eye-popping excess about the business responsible for fabricating our dreams. And we expect these because Marilyn's story is Hollywood lore at its most pure: a pretty picture masking darkness of all sorts.
So because we already know that Marily was not just a sparkling movie star and because this is all so widely familiar and with its own widely referenced myth and iconography, the only reason to make this into a film is that you have come up with some unique angle that sheds new unexpected light into the thing. A structure that can hold together so many cinematic dreams implicit by having at the center this woman who gave flesh to them.
At least the premise is sound, if not remarkable. A young man has written a book about his short time together with her, and on a movie set. We trust that a lot of that is fictional and doctored, itself not far from a movie script. Ideally, our film has the option of conflating personal recollection, diary, rehearsal, film being made, into our film about the fabrication of myths and an actress looking to understand the real person behind the role she's given to play.
The first half holds. A breezy, sparkling, leisurely stroll around a movie set, as we like to imagine must have been everyday life around movie stars. We bask in the radiance of making movies and play-acting. What better life?
In the second half however we expect to know the other side of the idealized image. Sex as no longer delicious eye-candy but baring the soul naked.
What do we get instead? That same stereotyped image attached to a score of movie clichés: tabloid proclamations, banality, hackneyed emotion diffused into TV soap. We know that Marilyn and this world was more complex than this. Gentlemen preferred the blonde for a reason and the film does not even begin to understand why.
