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Arthur Miller enters the Actors Studio, drawing its crowd into a reverent silence.
The camera tracks closer and closer to their faces with each cut.
His physicality has all the respect of an eye roll.
Her gaze darts between the script pages shaking in her hands and the reactions glinting across Millers face.
Tears dangle from her lash line like diamonds in suspended animation.
When shes called to speak, they fall.
Monroes mouth pops open, but shes stopped from speaking by freeze frame.
We dont get to see her performance or regard the skill that ends up moving Miller to tears himself.
Its not that she doesnt speakso much as what she says doesnt matter as much as what she endures.
You could call me Norma, she says to Miller, breathier with every syllable.
DominiksBlondeboth inherits and builds upon these considerations.
As a survival method, she has supposedly split herself in two.
And so de Armas cant help but channel the false notion that someones identity could be neatly halved.
Neither has interiority to speak of, beyond pain.
But her delight is short-lived.
She turns her head to see something that shocks her.
But when the camera cuts back from the typewriterto her face there is nothing.
De Armas simply confirms rather than complicates the films insistence that Monroe is an eternal victim.
You think Im too dumb to comprehend the joke on me?
Monroe used this skill to let people in.
De Armass problem is not that she appears natural.
(She doesnt.)
Reporters are bombarding her with questions.
Do you feel you have grown?
Monroe stalls, not wanting to fall into a trap.
Im not talking about inches, a female journalist clarifies over laughter.
Speaking of measurements, are they still the same as when you left?
another asks, remarking on her high-neck outfit.
Is this a new Marilyn, a new style?
Monroe retorts, No, Im the same person but it is a different suit.
Her eyes strategically drop and rise again with the joke.
Shes best when shes not the gravitational force powering a narrative; rather, shes its shot of relief.
Monroe has proven impenetrable for other actors, too.
Michelle Williams empathetically explores her insecurities in 2011sMy Week With Marilyn,but she lacks the effervescence.
As a result, neither actress can conjure the dynamism of a full person.
Monroe is literally a body to be cut into, and an autopsy to be made.
Perhaps only Theresa Russell in Nicolas Roegs completely fictionalInsignificancecrafts a performance that stands on its own.
Why are women so often called torepresentthings rather thanbethings in film?
Marilyn was not only a fiction; she was not simply an icon, she writes.
Yet wallowing in these phantasms of feminine horror simply reaffirms the noxious misogyny these stories purport to dissect.
The most evasive aspect of the legend, apparently: her humanity.
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