Blonde (2022)
SHOULD I SEE IT?
YES
Blonde arrives with as much buzz as a major theatrical release. A lot of eyes will be curious about this most controversial film.
Ana de Armas gives a stunning performance as Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe. She exceeds expectations with easily the most challenging role of her career.
The polarizing nature of the film will create fierce defenders…
NO
And the polarizing nature of the film will create fierce dissenters.
Recent interviews indicate that Andrew Dominik wasn’t all that keen on making a Marilyn Monroe biopic, but instead a movie documenting her self-destructive ways and horrific experiences in Hollywood. In that case, Marilyn Monroe becomes an afterthought here - ironically the very thing he claims he’s condemning.
Bleak, punishing, and exhausting - Blonde is cinematic mansplaining and lecturing, gleefully taking away the voice of its main subject.
OUR REVIEW
Is 2022 the year of great performances in subpar or disappointing movies?
We’ve had a few this year, and perhaps Ana de Armas’ work as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde is among the finest of them. de Armas leaves everything on screen for a writer and director, in Andrew Dominik, who is consumed with the trauma and tragedy of celebrity. He designs a blueprint of ugliness that feels steeped in generalities we have seen and heard about a thousand times before.
An immediate disclaimer: To minimize the pain and anguish depicted in Blonde is to no way diminish the recent #MeToo movement, Harvey Weinstein’s years and years of “casting couch” abuse, or the innumerable indignities female actors, musicians, and entertainers have been forced to endure for decades. The entertainment industry has been built on the back of misogyny and physical and sexual abuse. Those stories and experiences are very real, need to be heard, and Monroe absolutely experienced them.
In the hands of Dominik however, the film plays like a near three-hour highlight reel of tragedy; a compendium of circumstances that he shoves Marilyn into, largely identified here as Norma Jeane Baker. Using Joyce Carol Oates’ controversial best-selling book from 2000 as source material, Blonde is unabashedly a mix of truth and fiction. The problem with biopics taking such wild, incendiary leaps with the truth is that if enough people see the film, the misrepresentations and lies become the truth. As long as we are upfront about it, that’s fine (see Spencer or Jackie). When we are not, we are Bohemian Rhapsody or Elvis. In a recent interview, Dominik all but said he doesn’t really care about that truth vs. fiction stuff, as he was simply making a film about a woman who killed herself.
When we first meet Norma Jeane, she is portrayed by Lily Fisher, a young actor with such effortless on-screen presence that we are instantly drawn into the alternating black-and-white and colorful worlds Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin build for us. Norma Jeane’s mother (Julianne Nicholson) is crippled with escalating schizophrenia, barely functioning as a single mother. She convinces Norma Jeane that her father is a huge movie star and, in a night of absolute mental breakdown, she tries to drown her 8-year-old daughter in the bathtub.
From there, a living arrangement becomes a foster arrangement and Norma Jeane is shuffled around Los Angeles until she emerges as a 20ish year old acting hopeful, visiting a high-profile producer for a role in the classic film All About Eve. That producer, listed as Mr. Z (David Warshofsky), largely presumed to be David Zucker, takes a huge piece of Norma Jeane’s innocence that day, while a secretary sits outside his office and tries to focus on anything other than what’s happening behind that office door.
Again, singularly, these abusive encounters existing in the film are not the problem. Rather, it’s that Dominik paints every single encounter in his film as an eventual blunt-force trauma for Norma Jeane, or Marilyn Monroe, to recover from. We endure a highlight reel of pain and anguish and it plays so harshly that it almost becomes numbing to watch this unfold for nearly three full hours.
When there are positives for Norma Jeane, they are fleeting. A fictionalized throuple with actors Charlie “Cass” Chaplin, Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams) provides some illicit and curious fun. Promises of always being together go by the wayside the longer they try to stay together. A curious sequence in the film, is Dominik indicating these trysts and open relationships are more common than we realize? Is this a coping mechanism of survival for all involved? Or, as depicted, are we just exploiting more debauchery and sleaze in a world consumed with selfishness and narcissism?
Eventually, when that falls away, we are introduced to Marilyn’s two marriages and a ludicrous scene with President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson). I can only assume the scene exists to further a narrative that Kennedy was a letch and serial womanizer. In reality, their affair existed for years, but we get no context of truth here. Just a summoning to a hotel room, with someone in the cast identified as “President’s Pimp” sitting outside an open door while Monroe services the president while watching (checks notes) a rocket launch.
Yes, I’m serious.
With the marriages, Dominik shows us that Norma Jeane/Marilyn never really connected emotionally to either intense baseball star Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) or playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody). After the failed marriages play out and that scene with “The President” takes place, drinking, drugs, depression and paranoia floods in. Monroe is steadily declining.
Visually, at least we have Irvin’s striking visuals to pay attention to, with a really powerful score composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. And we, of course, have Ana de Armas. She dissolves into the role, capturing the voice and inflection that has so defined Monroe’s iconic legacy. The blonde hair and the birthmark is one thing. The pin-up model looks and movie star presence is another. The voice, the smile, the intensive eyes - de Armas nails the persona so organically, we forget the actor’s Cuban-born roots and wholeheartedly believe and accept we are watching Marilyn Monroe on screen.
However, we cannot celebrate that achievement while ignoring Dominik’s reckless lack of respect for his own subject. Stifling, his film seems stuck on a message it never truly defines. Is this a lecture on the toils of Hollywood? Are distinctions being drawn between Norma Jeane’s abuse in the 1950s to the abuses of today? Is it that nothing has changed in Hollywood or are we somehow condemning vulnerability and trust?
Maybe I missed it in the film’s bloated 166-minute running time, but it is hard to find anything that Norma Jeane, experiences which offers her much joy. Though Monroe’s life ended in tragedy, at just 36 years of age in 1962, she left a profound impact on an industry that constantly challenged her relevancy.
You wouldn’t know that here though. When recently asked about the more positive details from Marilyn’s laugh, Dominik was further dismissive of championing any of her successes. He simply wants us to feel how awful Marilyn Monroe’s life was. That is fine, he obviously gets to make the movie he wants to make.
However, his bleak, exhaustive treatise on celebrity seems, quite honestly, to not even need a Marilyn Monroe character at all. He is ranting about a lot more here than Monroe’s life can properly convey. She is simply the vessel with which he can project just how ugly fame can be.
In the end, we receive a nearly three hour finger wagging from Dominik and Ana de Armas’ stunning performance takes a backseat to excess and wrenching anguish. One could argue, this only further necessitates a need to have Monroe’s story told fairly and accurately. With Blonde however, we have yet one more example of a man taking a voice away from a woman and not caring enough to consider any of the consequences.
CAST & CREW
Starring: Ana de Armas, Bobby Cannavale, Adrien Brody, Xavier Samuel, Evan Williams, Lily Fisher, Julianne Nicholson, Sara Paxton, David Warshofsky, Caspar Phillipson, Rebecca Wisocky, Scoot McNairy, Chris Lemmon, Ned Bellamy
Director: Andrew Dominik
Written by: Andrew Dominik
Based on the novel “Blonde” by Joyce Carol Oates
Release Date: September 16, 2022
Netflix