That’s the same length as writer/director Andrew Dominik’s version, which was released last week in select cinemas before coming to Netflix. It’s the rare movie that I’d suggest watching at home rather than in a theatre, because it allows you to split the lumbering story into two parts for easier digestion.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
Ana de Armas stars as Monroe, and her performance is easily the best part of the film as she captures the star’s body language and breathy delivery but also her shrewdness and intellect. One scene shows her arguing with a studio lackey over being paid far less than Jane Russell in an upcoming movie. “I’m going to get $5,000 and I’m the blonde in?” she shouts into the phone. The next time it rings she announces: “F–k Marilyn, she’s not here” and hangs up.
True, her accent wavers a little in a few scenes. But that’s nothing compared to Dominik’s uneven direction, as he switches from colour to black and white, sometimes within a single scene, frames the action as realistic one moment and dreamlike the next, or lets the score run from silent to period-specific to an ethereal, almost nightmare sound.Meanwhile, his script truly hammers home the notion that “Marilyn Monroe” was a construct that just happened to share the same body as Norma Jeane.
For a while it feels like no one else will make an impression on the viewer, but we eventually get Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody as her husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, each struggling to love the larger-than-life superstar. Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams bookend her adult life as actor-friends Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. Though it’s a little much to have one of them tell her: “We’re juniors to men who never wanted us.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)