Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me review – sympathetic retelling of a tragic life – The Guardian
The unusual, unhappy story of Anna Nicole Smith is retold on this Netflix documentary by Ursula Macfarlane, who made Untouchable, about Harvey Weinstein. Smith was the previous Playboy centrefold and Guess Denims mannequin who wound up lifeless of a drug overdose in 2007 on the age of 39, quickly after her 20-year-old son had tragically died the identical method. There are eerie similarities with the lifetime of Pamela Anderson, additionally a latest Netflix topic, although Anderson survives and thrives.
Smith was a smalltown Texas lady from a tricky background – though she was accused by her mom of producing abuse tales for publicity. She embraced Playboy superstardom, tabloid notoriety and media letching that so simply flipped over into misogynist hate. Like Anderson, Smith used the “blonde” picture as a form of persona or disguise or armour and (as with Anderson) it’s unusual to see her pre- or non-blonde normality from non-public pictures.
Smith began out as a dancer in a Texas strip membership, having already had a child from a rash teenage marriage; one of many clients within the membership was 86-year-old oil billionaire J Howard Marshall who grew to become infatuated with Smith, showered her with cash and items, and at last married her – to the fashion of his grownup son Pierce, who succeeded in ringfencing the previous man’s complete property in a belief so Smith may get not one of the cash after his dying.
It’s an unimaginable story, though, frustratingly, this film is just too coy to only ask the Mrs Merton query: what first attracted her to the billionaire oil baron? Oddly, the movie cites Marilyn Monroe in Gents Choose Blondes – and Anna Nicole’s life is a tremendous real-life revival of that story – however doesn’t quote Marilyn’s basic, impenitent line: “Don’t {that a} man being wealthy is sort of a lady being fairly? Chances are you’ll not love your lady simply because she’s fairly, however my goodness doesn’t it assist?”
This documentary makes use of an excessive amount of current archive interview materials (although annoyingly with out giving provenance) together with what seems to be Playboy TV footage of her reality-TV-style assembly along with her long-estranged dad, who had left dwelling when she was a child, along with a half-brother; neither of them knew who she had turn out to be earlier than their reunion. A extra facetious movie would have questioned in regards to the circumstances through which these two males may have already got been conversant in Smith’s picture, as Christopher Hitchens did in his vignette for Self-importance Honest. However this movie suggests, grimly, that this estranged dad then tried to assault her.
In the long run, Smith was a prisoner of her picture, of the paparazzi celeb business, and her personal abuse of alcohol and medicines, having obtained hooked on ache drugs after her breast enhancement operation (a gruesomely metaphoric occasion). It’s an efficient retelling, although the movie may have concentrated extra on her tragicomic relationship along with her oil plutocrat husband. Might it even have been a love story in spite of everything?
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