167 min | NC-17 | September 16, 2022 | Netflix
Andrew Dominik turns the life of Marilyn Monroe into a 167-minute gauntlet of abuse, told through the abandoned child she never stopped being. Ana de Armas commits to every second of it. The film mistakes suffering for insight.
Norma Jeane Baker becomes Marilyn Monroe and the world devours her. Andrew Dominik adapts Joyce Carol Oates’s novel into a fever dream that treats Monroe’s life as one continuous wound. The film is not interested in the woman who built a career. It is interested in the victim who got destroyed by men, by studios, and by her own face. Every scene exists to deliver another humiliation, and the relentlessness becomes the entire point of the exercise.
Ana de Armas plays Norma Jeane with total commitment and a vulnerability that never lets up. She nails the breathy public voice and then strips it away in private to reveal a frightened girl who calls every man Daddy. The performance is the only thing holding the film together. Adrien Brody plays The Playwright with a gentle decency that the script quickly discards. Bobby Cannavale plays The Ex-Athlete as jealous rage in a suit. Julianne Nicholson plays Gladys, the mother, with a terrifying instability in the early scenes that haunts everything after. These actors give more than the material returns to them.
Dominik shoots the film in shifting aspect ratios and switches between color and black and white without obvious logic. The technique announces itself constantly and rarely earns the disruption. Chayse Irvin’s cinematography recreates famous photographs with precision, then forces the camera inside Monroe’s body for sequences that play as pure cruelty. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score the misery with a drone that never lifts. The production design is immaculate and the staging is airless. Every frame is composed to make you watch a woman suffer.
This is a film that confuses degradation with depth. Dominik strips Monroe of agency, intelligence, and interiority, then presents her emptiness as tragedy. The fictionalized horrors pile up until they stop landing and start to feel like a thesis the movie keeps proving to itself. De Armas deserves a better vehicle for this much effort. The film has a clear vision of Marilyn Monroe and that vision is a corpse it keeps poking.