Maggie Gyllenhaal's short film Flesh Impact imagines Marilyn Monroe at 100, with Ellen Burstyn playing the centenarian star and Dakota Johnson portraying her in earlier life stages. The 22-minute film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, September 7, is actually an advert commissioned by car brand Genesis to celebrate Monroe's centenary.
The film opens with Burstyn's Monroe in 2026 driving a sleek new electric SUV from the company, trailing her hand out the rolled-down window before pulling up alongside the pavement and plugging it into a streetlight to charge. While the product placement is less-than-elegant, there's an undeniable fascination in seeing a star who died in 1962 alongside technology from over 60 years later.
Burstyn's luminous performance
Burstyn's Monroe bustles into a theatre to audition, unrecognised with her cane and the cloak of old age, going by the name 'Jane Doe' after introducing herself by her birthname 'Norma' and mentioning previous surnames like 'DiMaggio' and 'Miller'. She has a piece prepared for a 25-year-old character, and despite pointedly mentioning she's 'a bit mature' for the role, the director (Peter Sarsgaard) and his associate (Sepideh Moafi) allow her to perform – although cruelly because 'it might be funny'.
Burstyn begins a meandering monologue covering her lonely childhood in and out of orphanages, being blamed for the death of co-star Clark Gable, and the Billy Wilder quote that gives the film its name: he said it felt like people could reach out and touch her. It's an intensely theatrical set-up, almost too artificial to ignore, yet Burstyn completely captures attention with her spirit. She looks completely luminous as Monroe, with now-white hair still carefully coiffed, a beauty spot on her cheek, and an immaculate outfit of pencil skirt, monogrammed blouse and white heels (which she takes off to act).
Johnson captures the essence
At 100, Monroe must command with her acting talent to be noticed – skills she felt were never truly appreciated in her youth, having claimed renowned acting coach Lee Strasberg said she was 'as good as Brando'. The message that age has eclipsed beauty – which is all Monroe was ever made to feel she could offer – is not subtle, but Burstyn nails it.
Throughout her speech, the film flashes back to earlier points in Monroe's life, where Johnson appears – either striding through the 20th Century Fox backlot in a negligee as part of Monroe's rebellion against studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, or offering her Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire in the bathtub. Johnson doesn't really look or sound like Monroe, but it doesn't really matter because – like Burstyn – there's a fitting quality to her performance that captures some of that famous essence and the well-documented vulnerability.
Cast and director insights
At the Venice Film Festival on Monday, ahead of the film's public screening, Burstyn recalled her real-life encounter with Marilyn Monroe in a nightclub, explaining how it informed her approach to playing her. 'She was sitting across from me. And of course I was enchanted by just looking at her. She was such a magical creature,' the Oscar winner told Metro and other press, ahead of receiving her Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. 'Then she looked at me and nodded at me. I was very early in my career and I thought, was I just recognised by Marilyn Monroe? And I was; I carried that in my heart forever.'
Burstyn, who trained under Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio in New York like Monroe, said that this meeting – and also sharing the same masseur, Ralph Richards – helped with her performance. 'He had been Marylin's masseur and, not only that, but her confidant. So I used to get my massages on the massage table and hear Marilyn stories.' Her favourite was that Monroe's 'whole persona was a construction, that that wasn't the way she was at all'.
Filmmaker Gyllenhaal explained how the commissioners had asked her to use AI, having used 'licensable AI, training it off of Marilyn Monroe films that we had licensed'. She experimented with mapping Monroe's face onto Johnson's, but ultimately threw it away. 'What was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive,' she revealed, per Variety, adding that it 'fundamentally did not work' and that 'all the reasons we decided to make this project to begin with were killed off in the AI version'. A release date for Flesh Impact is yet to be confirmed.
