![]() ![]() It’s near impossible to watch this series and not think of the recent documentaries on Britney Spears – Netflix’s Britney vs Spears and two New York Times projects on FX on Hulu, all three of which contain uneasy elements of obsession with its central focus. There are some truly egregious moments, such as a dramatization of the forensic pathologist dropping a sample of Murphy’s lung in water to confirm pneumonia during the autopsy (why not just say it was pneumonia? Why include a coroner at all?), or a recreation of the bathroom where she died. The two episodes indulge in a host of true crime tropes – tasteless recreations of pill bottles tipped over on the bedside table, slow motion pans over a messy bathroom, heavy-handed score – in covering Murphy’s promising career, health issues and especially her marriage to Monjack, who appears to have been one of the least convincing con artists ever. More troublingly, the series seems aimed for clickbait headlines – “The eight biggest bombshells from the Brittany Murphy documentary,” etc. Hill includes numerous YouTube clips of fans speculating over the nature of Monjack and Sharon Murphy’s questionably tight relationship – a choice that was perhaps intended to demonstrate how Monjack’s shadiness fostered a thousand theories, but ends up perpetuating them.īrittany Murphy and Simon Monjack in 2007. Like Britney vs Spears, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary on the pop star’s conservatorship which premiered on Netflix last month, What Happened, Brittany Murphy? prioritizes the experience of people adjacent to her pain – what the timeline and attention was like for the police officer, the lawyer, the PR representative, the Radar Online reporter who interviewed Monjack after her death. This comes primarily from the testimony of Murphy’s King of the Hill co-star Kathy Najimy and longtime friend Kelley Faulkner, two of the few participants who seem genuinely invested in projecting Murphy’s legacy as an enthusiastic, versatile performer and ebullient coworker.īut Hill undermines her own half-hearted attempts for critique by swerving into both pure schlock and the trap of mistaking interest for importance. It touches on the intense focus on women’s bodies during the period when Murphy briefly rose to “it-girl” fame the whole concept of a cheeky, tiny, perennially “on” it girl in the first place the relentless scrutiny of her body, her transformation from “ugly” (she never was) to hot speculation about pills and plastic surgery (the truth of which is beside the point) how Hollywood facilitated disordered eating. The only child of a single mother, Murphy dreamed of Hollywood success, agonized over fitting in and was an open book of emotion amid myriad pressures over how to be a star in the late 90s.Īt times, the series does seem interested in re-evaluating or seriously considering the pressures that precipitated Murphy’s professional struggles, exacerbated her health conditions and made her vulnerable to an emotionally abusive and controlling husband. All attest to a bubbly, ambitious, preternaturally kind and talented performer, as evidenced by old footage from her early theater days in New Jersey. There are glimpses of a different, more considerate Murphy series – Hill managed to recruit some of Murphy’s childhood friends to participate, as well as co-stars such as Taryn Manning, and Amy Heckerling, the director of her breakout performance as a made-over ugly duckling in 1995’s Clueless. ![]() But this series, directed by Cynthia Hill, feels less like a monument to Murphy’s life than an exploitation of her death, the tropes and pitfalls of true crime obsession – another’s pain as a puzzle, hyper-clinical detail, unwarranted skepticism, speculation for speculation’s sake – metastasized into one of the queasiest reconsiderations of a 90s/00s star. There is certainly space for a film or series to revisit Murphy’s largely undervalued career, her live-wire presence on screen, and the pressures which cornered her into a controlling marriage and, by many accounts, paralyzing anxiety over her career and appearance. Combing through tabloid reports, medical documents and first-hand accounts of people orbiting her death, it purports to explain Murphy’s tragic, untimely demise and, more pertinent to headlines, her abusive, constrictive marriage to Simon Monjack, who died five months after her of pneumonia. That dialogue is a ruse for the two hours between these moments, What Happened, Brittany Murphy? takes on the role of amateur sleuth.
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