My Week(s) With Marilyn Monroe

“Based on real life” films are generally bunk, at least in terms of portraying history. The vast majority necessarily invent dialogue, conflate characters and events, and simplify cause and effect to the point of being unrecognizable. For every United 93, which attempts to get across rigorously researched facts as well as feelings, there are a hundred films like We Bought A Zoo, which bills itself as a “true zoo story” while eliminating virtually every aspect of the true story (as laid out in Benjamin Mee’s book of the same name) and replacing it with a more trite and sentimental invented one. All too often, “based on a true story” in the credits means “we took a few key details from a true story to give new flavor to a canned story arc that the audience already knows well.”