Even in a year that gave audiences the media hurricane of Don’t Worry Darling, this will likely go down as the most controversial film of 2022. Over the last few months, I’ve heard no shortage of horror stories about CGI fetuses and how exploitative its depiction of Marilyn Monroe’s life is. Since it is one of the bigger titles of the year, I knew I’d have to get to it eventually… but understandably, I’ve been a bit apprehensive about it. But hey, it’s got Ana de Armas continuing to spread her wings as a lead actress, and I quite liked the last film I saw from director Andrew Dominik in One More Time With Feeling (not to mention Nick Cave and Warren Ellis doing the soundtrack for this as well); maybe this will be another case where I find something good where others didn’t. Well… maybe I did? Even after I finished writing this, I’m still not sure.
This is the biopic as psycho-thriller. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates book of the same name, which made it a point to state that it was a fictionalised version of the life of its subject, there is a constant tug-of-war between fiction and reality. Between the image and the person who casts it. Between Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jean. Across this nearly-three-hour trip, Chayse Irvin’s cinematography continually shifts between black-and-white and colour footage, shot across a variety of different aspect ratios; it’s almost like he and Dominik are begging the audience to try and put together what indicates the reality and what indicates the fiction.
To that end, right from its literally fiery opening, the way it shows that kind of psychological disconnect makes for properly unsettling material. Ana de Armas is effective to an almost-nightmarish degree here, expertly navigating her way through Norma’s many states of mind. Even when the film relegates her to a Freudian case study (fears of becoming her mother, looking for men who can take the place of her father and call “Daddy”, that kind of thing), she puts in work to make this image into a full-blooded person.
And on the note of this star as just an image, just a… thing plastered onto a screen, what Dominik (and presumably Oates with the source material) are doing here is drawing attention to the deception of that image. Of how Norma dissociates so much from the her-on-the-screen that Marilyn might as well be an entirely different person, and how the film industry and audiences in retrospect have done likewise. Taking that image of the Hollywood starlet, one of the poster children of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and shattering it to reveal what went into the artifice. It’s a rejection of the old ‘separate the art from the artist’ adage to show that that image, the one that film history has held up with such renown, is the product of a fucking tragedy. Glorifying this only makes shit worse, especially since we’re all painfully aware of how much this kind of mistreatment has lingered well beyond the Golden Age.
As purely horrifying material, it works… but at what cost? Watching this, I couldn’t help but think back to when I looked at Judy, another biopic that sought to highlight the tragedy of Hollywood stardom. Except, where that film made it a point to create solidarity with her plight, and refused to just let her be a sacrificial lamb to the industry machine, this seems to just revel in it. She is made into a symbol for every broken heart that got chewed up and spat out by Hollywood, and in the process, Norma’s humanity is erased. The filmmakers are so fixated on the idea of the image, of the façade, that they’ve become careless about the human fucking being who is that image.
It doesn’t help that this film contains some of the wildest creative decisions of any film I’ve ever reviewed, much less seen in 2022. While Cave and Ellis’ soundtrack is fantastic, and really nails the dark psychological tone of the story, the use of Ev’ry Baby Needs A Da-Da-Daddy as wraparound for a Weinsteinian rape scene was… yeah. Quite disturbing, and not for any of the right reasons. To say nothing of the aforementioned CGI fetuses, which start out alright as part of the visualisation of Norma’s fears of her maternal past repeating itself, but once it starts talking to her, it makes for a particularly disgusting moment. Any arguments to be made about whether this moment is pro-life or pro-choice or anything in between feels entirely beside the point, since I’m far more concerned with how this moment amounts to guilt-tripping a dead woman, over something that apparently didn’t even happen in the first place.
I don’t hate this movie. This has been Andrew Dominik’s passion project for over a decade, and it shows through in all the interesting visual ideas and almost-Lynchian cross-breeding of Hollywood woes and psychological trauma. I’ll even admit that its subversion of the idea of the Hollywood star leads to some solid notions and underpinnings. But for every time this film made me uncomfortable for the intended reasons, there were about nine others where I just found this whole thing’s existence hard to stomach. I can understand taking a dark look at the industry’s history of exploitation through highlighting one of its most ‘iconic’ examples, but there’s a point where it stops commenting on it and just… becomes it.
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