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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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Love, Marilyn: Another Look at the Icon
HBO’s “Love, Marilyn” begins with moving images of Marilyn Monroe on the screen together with a female voice saying, “If anyone ever asked you what Marilyn Monroe was really like, well, how would you answer them? So much has been written about Marilyn Monroe that details of her life become colored pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. If you read enough, and turn them over enough, they fall into a pattern.”
After that statement the voice stops and the following words appear on the screen:
“Over one thousand books have been written about Marilyn Monroe.”
Writer/Producer/Director Liz Garbos’ film is that aforementioned kaleidoscope, challenging the viewer to see the patterns. Garbos gathers a massive amount of archival material for her 110 minute film – including Marilyn’s recently discovered personal papers, diaries, poems, journals and letters – to tell a bit of the star’s biography, and, especially, to seek the woman behind her persona’s screen. This material, these many bits and pieces, are uttered by a large cast of celebrated actors – some voice over, some on camera. They are reciting Marilyn’s writings, selections from published books about her, and statements made by now-deceased people who had contact with her. And there are more pieces. The film also includes on-camera interviews of Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, Amy Greene, Molly Haskell, Truman Capote, Laurence Olivier, Lee Stassberg, Elia Kazan, and others.
For most folks with a beating heart, there’s no way that a well-produced biographical documentary about someone – let alone a gifted someone – dying young would not leave us with a deep sadness. Whatever else we may think and feel is, of course, sculpted by our beliefs and values, our thoughts about psychology, about the wanderings of an innocent in the halls of power, and our thoughts about our own lives. We project our picture onto the kaleidoscopic pattern, seeing the picture we want to see.
Patterns aside, this is a measure of the power Garbos’ work. In a very short time we get to know our heroine, and then she’s immediately taken away from us. Marilyn Monroe is no longer a chapter in American cultural history, she’s now someone we got to know and like, and whatever the reason, whatever the manner, we lost her.