The New Yorker:

“Arthur Miller: Writer,” a new HBO documentary about the playwright’s life and work, was produced and directed by Miller’s daughter Rebecca, who collected footage for it for more than twenty years. Often, she was able to shoot from intimate or rarified vantages: her father carving a freshly roasted chicken, reading the newspaper, picking up a pair of bluejeans from the floor and putting them back on. “I felt I was the only filmmaker that he would let close enough to really see what he was like,” she explains, in an early voice-over. In conversation, Miller exhibits deep intelligence and an almost preternatural grace—he appreciates both the inanity and the magnificence of living. While reflecting on his experiences, he will often say something casual but unbearably profound, like “People are far more difficult to change than I had allowed myself to believe.” (Oof.)

Rebecca, who is fifty-five, has also worked as a filmmaker, novelist, and painter, and is married to the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She is a child of Miller’s third marriage, to the Austrian photographer Inge Morath. Her father’s romantic relationships occupy a good chunk of her movie. In 1940, Miller married Mary Slattery; in 1951, he met Marilyn Monroe. “It wasn’t enough for me, suddenly,” Miller admits of his first marriage. He and Monroe began exchanging letters, which were filled with yearning. For the next five years, Miller struggled to metabolize his guilt and anger: “I no longer knew what I wanted, certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable,” he writes in “Timebends,” his autobiography, from 1987. He went to work each day past a life-size cutout of Monroe—the famous shot from “The Seven Year Itch,” in which she’s laughing, her white skirt billowing up around her.

Go to link