Norman Mailer: The American

Norman Mailer was an influential author and journalist known for his books The Naked and the Dead & The Executioner's Song, a famous profile of Marilyn Monroe, and cofounding The Village Voice. Yet, he also had an irascible, sometimes volatile personality, which resulted in an often tumultuous personal life, which is sadly what the filmmakers of this documentary chose to focus on, offering a tabloid view of what should have been an interesting life story. By the time the film concludes and the experts have espoused him as the greatest writer of the second half of the 20th Century, we don't feel we've been given that impression, or rather that these summations adequately sum up the film's theses.