blonde-movie

Blonde

If one wanted to be generous to writer-director Andrew Dominik, they might say that his punishing, persistently unpleasant Blonde is a call of solidarity with its protagonist, Marilyn Monroe. An attempt to ease her pain by forcing the audience to share it with her. Unfortunately, Dominik makes this kind of generosity impossible, and while an artist’s work shouldn’t be judged by how they behave outside of it, certain interviews have gone on to prove that his interests do not lie with humanizing Monroe’s life but instead glamorizing her trauma. Dominik and Netflix, the movie’s production studio, have made pains to point out that this is a fictional film, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. What’s clear early on is that Dominik is much more beholden to Oates’ macabre vision than he ever is to Monroe herself, and the result is 167-minute journey into Hollywood Hell with very little to be learned.

Monroe is played by Ana de Armas, an actress whose innate likability and charm in roles like Knives Out and No Time to Die show that she has the talent and the chops to be a movie star. This is her most ambitious and most high profile role to date, and De Armas proves a committed performer, buying in completely on Dominik’s daunting vision. This unfortunately does her performance no favors. Her Cuban accent, peeking slightly but frequently beneath her breathy take on Monroe is a rejection of the verisimilitude that Dominik is trying to conjure in his images, which otherwise recalls the likeness of Monroe in striking detail. I think there is room to experiment with off-brand casting in biopics, but Dominik never really turns this into anything special. It becomes indicative of the movie’s larger issue: as much as Dominik insists on the fictionality of his story, it still depends on exacting recreation of pictures and films that we know so well.

Blonde starts when Monroe is Norma Jeane Mortenson, a young girl raised by Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), a mentally unstable single mother, who gives Norma a framed headshot of a dashing, mustachioed man and claims that it’s her long lost father. For nearly three hours, Blonde goes on to place this ghostly figure at the center of all of Monroe’s troubles, narrowing the scope of her life and career to overwrought daddy issues. As Norma grows up and is transformed into Marilyn Monroe, these issues plague her in her fraught, abusive relationships with men. She gains notoriety as a pin-up model, and her willingness to pose nude catches the eye of those in Hollywood looking for the next big thing. After she’s abruptly raped by a studio head named Mr. Z (David Warshofzky), her movie career begins, and her fight for roles that challenge her abilities is frequently undermined by men who only see her sex appeal.

Monroe is insistent throughout her career that Norma Jeane is the real her, and that Marilyn Monroe is just a creation that she doesn’t even recognize in herself. She’s imprisoned by Monroe, consumed by the meteoric rise to fame. The closest she comes to a happy relationship is a “thruple” with the rambunctious sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson (Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams, respectively). They understand how punishing the limelight can be, and they allow her to be Norma Jeane. But the novelty of being with two men simultaneously proves too risqué for the studio and her team. In her marriages – first to an ex-athlete (Bobby Cannavale) whose frail masculinity and insecurity turns abusive, and then to a sensitive playwright (Adrien Brody) who can’t find a way to communicate to his younger, more complicated wife – she struggles to cobble together the image of the man she hopes to come save her.

Dominik lays it on pretty thick. In both marriages, Monroe calls her husbands only “Daddy”. De Armas must say “Daddy” in this movie over a hundred times. It’s only one example where Dominik’s obvious lack of sensitivity borders on cruelty (not to mention having no sense of how embarrassing it is for his actress). Another is his treatment of Monroe’s several abortions (which are unsubstantiated and, according to most, a total fiction created in Oates’ novel), which proceed in a shockingly evocative style. In one instance, the procedure is shown from inside her cervix. They are all performed against her will, but Dominik conjures a surprising amount of pro-life imagery: floating images of the innocent, docile fetus. In one particularly bad taste moment, Monroe imagines that aborted fetus talking to her, castigating her for what she’s done, sending her further down a spiral of despair.

Much can be said about Blonde‘s offensive politics, and the reprehensible way it projects them into the film, but perhaps the movie’s greatest sin is that it is boring. Dominik is a director known for his lush filmmaking (The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford might be the best-looking movie of this short century) and Blonde does have a lot of handsome compositions, but it reminded me of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant in 2015, which also framed its harrowing story in the prettiest lighting one could imagine. I didn’t like that film at all and I don’t think Blonde is very good either. I don’t much see the point in taking such off-putting imagery and trying to guss it up, as if to trick the audience into thinking its cinematic. In its heart, Blonde certainly sees itself as superior to the placating nature of most biopics, but in trying to be subversive, it actually settles for cheap melodrama. Dominik falls well short of being the intelligent provocateur, and instead proves himself to be a wearying hack.

I make no claim to being a scholar on Monroe or her career. I think she’s wonderful in Some Like it Hot and All About Eve, but there’s a lot of her classics that I still need to see. I can’t argue on her behalf with any real information, but I can say that Blonde would be a disservice to any person, alive or dead, who could claim it’s based on their likeness. It’s telling that the equally famous men in Monroe’s life (studio titan Darryl Zanuck, ex-New York Yankee Joe Di Maggio, Pulitzer-winning playwright Arthur Miller) are left nameless in the film. Why Dominik feels they should be protected by this story, I couldn’t tell you, but it’s just another detail that adds to the movie’s overall misogyny. Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific, award-winning author, but her style is never meant to serve as historical record. There’s a degree to which films literalize things that are only figurative on the page. So yes, there’s evidence that this movie should have never been made. But I think that there’s even more evidence that the way Dominik chose to make it is the worst way of all.

 

Written for the Screen and Directed by Andrew Dominik