TV-14 | 1h 41min | Biography, Documentary, Film History | 27 April 2022 (USA)
How much you glean by watching the new Netflix documentary “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes” (MMMUT) is completely contingent on what you already know about Monroe going in. It is more or less an adaptation of the 1985 book “Goddess: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe” by heralded non-fiction writer Anthony Summers.
I was among the millions who devoured “Goddess” when it came out which led me down a rabbit-hole of other similar (and largely inferior) books and eventually a dead end. Both the Summers book and this film directed by Emma Cooper (the “Louis Theroux” franchise) don’t end as much as they just stop. They’re the mystery equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” Mozart’s “Requiem,” or Beethoven’s “10th Symphony:” All  left unfinished because of the deaths of their creators.
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