OnScreen Review: "Blonde"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Before seeing Blonde, the only Marilyn Monroe biopic I had seen was My Week with Marilyn, directed by Simon Curtis and starring Michelle Williams as Monroe in an Oscar-nominated performance. That focused on a specific period of her life toward the end. I was intrigued by the prospects of a new biopic, especially with the talented Ana de Armas set to play the iconic blonde and Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesses James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly) directing. To say I was surprised and shocked by the final product is an understatement.
The film runs the gamut of Monroe’s life, from her childhood as Norma Jeane growing up with her mentally unstable mother to getting her start in Hollywood and all the sordidness that entailed at that time, becoming the desire of every man in America/the world, her marriages to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrian Brody), the intensity of the public spotlight, and her eventual struggle with drugs and her demise. Her relationships with others, including JFK, are also sprinkled in with questionable taste.
There have been few film I have watched where I am taken by the lead performance and so completely turned off by almost everything else in the film. Several actresses have portrayed Monroe in the past, though Williams is the only one I can recall seeing, so I have little to compare Ana de Armas to in this regard aside from the actual Marilyn Monroe and her acting. But de Armas is about as pitch perfect as someone is likely to get at portraying this iconic woman and capturing her essence as someone who was never taken seriously because of her looks and the persona she often portrayed on screen as a dumb blonde. With an icon like Marilyn Monroe, it can be difficult to She gets the voice down almost entirely (only in a few moments when she is yelling does her Cuban accent emerge) and the hair and makeup department definitely do their job to make her look the part too. She is really giving her all here, which is a real shame, because it is not a film that deserves so strong a performance.
There seem to be a lot of liberties taken with the truth in this film, though perhaps that is because the film is based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which itself is not a biography. Perhaps, then, it is even incorrect to label this film as a biopic. But the film certainly presents itself as a biopic, in so far as its approach is to dress itself up as much as possible in the imagery and recreate the iconic moments of her life, re-enacting several movie scenes and publicity photos. They take a lot of liberties with her relationships and her health, with theme on pregnancy and babies that almost becomes a weird fixation.
Narratively, the film is all over the place, careening from checkpoint to checkpoint in Marilyn’s life with little structure. Dates and places are thrown in with hardly any rhyme or reason. Much like Elvis earlier this year, Blonde is oddly lacking in conveying the feeling of someone going from being a nobody to one of the most famous people in the world. There’s no real sense that life is dramatically changing. It also hammers you over the head with the message that the woman on the big screen is not the real person. Norma Jeane is the person and Marilyn is the persona, and in case you did not already know this, you will never be able to forget it by how many times it comes up over the 167-minute runtime. It is repeated several times with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The film also uses several different aspect ratios and constantly changes from black & white to technicolor. At first, this was something that seemed to be inspired, maybe matching the story to the style of the movies she was making at the time, but as it happened more and more, it came off more distracting from the story rather than enhancing it. It is like the film has multiple personality disorder, which is too bad, because a lot of this film is nice to look at, especially the technicolor-tinged moments that give it a real retro look and feel. One could envision, even, a biopic of Marilyn that leans into this idea with greater effect and tells her story through these black and white and technicolor styles from her films, but this is not that film.
Marilyn Monroe was and is a sex symbol, and the film leans into that, in fact it is rated NC-17. Domink goes into painstaking detail to point out the unrelenting and unforgiving speculative nature of the Hollywood spotlight only to embrace the tabloid nature of the narrative when it comes to how he depicts her various relationships with men and her health, from the highly sexualized depiction of her relationship with Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. to a hypothetical abortion she may or may not have actually wanted to a later miscarriage. There are a couple questionable camera shots in the film as well; at least two involving the abortion from inside the birth canal that I could have done without, and another from inside a toilet that she is vomiting into that just made me say, “Ok, why?” I am not against NC-17 films or provocative filmmaking, but I fail to see what those moments added to the film.
Nothing, though, is more salacious or, frankly, demeaning than the scene with Marilyn and JFK, which takes place in an NYC hotel. After an extended scene on an airplane where she ventures from her seat to the bathroom and in between walks down a movie aisle surrounded by an applauding audience, she is whisked to a hotel suite where JFK is on his bed watch TV and talking on the phone with someone trying to tell him that his extramarital affairs are bad for the country. JFK promptly engages her with some (lightly???) forced sexual activity, while he is still on the phone and the TV shows military footage. It all plays out like worst kind of pastiche of a scene from an Oliver Stone movie or something. It is made all the worse when it is revealed that the bedroom door has been open the whole time and the Secret Service is milling about outside the room like it is business as usual. It was at this point in the movie I genuinely questioned why the director, Andrew Dominik, had wanted to make this movie and whether he had any love or fondness for the character at the heart of the story he was telling.
Despite a strong performance from Ana de Armas, there is very little to recommend Blonde to most viewers. Frankly, I was glad I was able to sit at home and watch it on Netflix from the comfort of my couch instead of having to see it in a movie theater as I was able to pace myself, pausing the movie at one point for dinner before coming back to finish it. Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman who was exploited from the moment she stepped foot in the Hollywood studio system. It would have been nice to see a film that elevated her and gave her some proper due, rather than reveling in seeing her suffer. Blonde shows that the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe continues.
Rating 1.5 out of 5 stars