Blonde

Can you imagine having the freedom to tell the story of an icon without being bound to facts, fandom, or narrative formulas, and still reverting to the same old tired biopic tropes and clichés? That's what Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly, One More Time with Feeling) does in his adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's biographical fiction novel Blonde (2000), about the life and career of the actress, sex symbol, and movie star Marilyn Monroe. I've not read the Oates book, but I have no issue with writers, filmmakers, or other artists commandeering public figures and using them in their work. But I do object to deplorable biopics. And, while Oates's 700-page tome may involve some highly creative narrative design, Dominik's 166 min film follows the hoary cradle-to-grave structure Hollywood has been recycling since it invented the two-reeler. Of course, Blonde is not meant to be a straightforward biopic, but rather a treatise on how society can objectify, process, and commodify a person to such an extent that it destroys them. And while I assume part of the point of Blonde is to humanise the legendary silver-screen bombshell, all it does is further reduce this singular American luminary to the thinnest depiction of a human being yet devised—that of a biopic protagonist.

Like far too many main characters in this exhausted form of storytelling, the Marilyn of this movie is haunted by the events of her childhood. We meet young Norma Jeane Mortenson (played as a child by Lily Fisher) being raised by her mentally unstable mother Gladys, who lies to her about who her father is, drives her into a raging fire in the Hollywood Hills, and attempts to drown her in a bathtub all in the opening few minutes. Julianne Nicholson plays Gladys, and it's depressing that the great actress chose to play, or ended up playing, both Marilyn Monroe's mother and "Weird Al" Yankovic's mother in two inept attempts at deconstructing the biopic released in the same year—which makes it difficult to take either performance seriously. Of all the hackneyed clichés in the bankrupt genre, the tritest, most simplistic, and abundantly overused is how a troubled childhood is boiled down to a few key moments in the first act that then haunt the protagonist throughout the rest of the movie. In the case of Blonde, Marilyn is haunted by both the idea of her absent father, and her desire and fear of becoming a mother herself.

Marilyn's confused emotions around her own potential parenthood are explored via conversations she has with her unborn child before and after her various abortions and miscarriages. These sequences play out via a ridiculous giant CGI fetus floating around in an oversized womb scolding Marilyn for her reckless choices. But it's Dominik's choices that come off as irresponsible and shameful, as these sequences strip his main character of all humanity and reduce her down to a generically simplistic idea of what abortion regret must feel like.

These intentionally provoking moments feel out of sync with the rest of the picture, which seems determined to condemn the audience and make us all feel complicit in the terrible way Marilyn was treated by an entertainment industry that we all participate in, and a society we're all a part of. In Dominik's film, all of us watching are sex-obsessed voyeurs—what a novel concept for a movie about movies! Also hardly innovative for a picture like this is the way the director recreates iconic images of his highly public protagonist—we see photographs and posters that even audiences who've never seen a Monroe film will recognize—and builds scenes around them that run counter to how she looks in the shots. Like, wow, maybe she actually wasn't happy when she took that picture where she was smiling!

The movie constantly pulls back on itself, commenting on its own iconography in ways that might have felt innovative in the 1990s. Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin shoot in digital monochrome. I assume this choice is an attempt to recreate the look of the period, which it doesn't succeed in doing any more than David Fincher's terrible Mank did in 2020. The filmmakers also switch to color at key moments, shift aspect ratios, and make the images look as if they were shot on a variety of different film stocks, deliberately drawing attention to the artifice of what we're watching. Ana de Armas recreates Monroe's signature look and breathy voice but her Cuban accent occasionally slips out accidentally/on purpose, as if to further shatter the illusion of blaa blaa blaa... (I can't believe I'm even writing about this). Suffice it to say, I do not think Ana de Armas is served well by this film, nor is the film served well by her. After scoring big with her notable appearance in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), her phenomenal breakout performance in Knives Out (2019), and her highly enjoyable bit part in No Time to Die (2021), de Armas has had an embarrassing 2022 with three poor performances in three terrible movies—Deep Water, The Gray Man, and Blonde. [But what do I know, she was Oscar-nominated for Best Actress for her work here.]

This Netflix original is rated NC-17. Do streamers really need MPAA ratings or is that more of a marketing gimmick? Regardless, the picture earns this rating for several graphic scenes of sexual assaults, a toilet’s-eye-view of Marilyn puking, an extended scene of forced fellatio, and two, yes two, intrauterine POV shots. This would all be laughable if it didn't feel like such an assault, but I guess that's the point. We're meant to have both a visceral experience of what it must have been like for Marilyn to go through all she went through and feel like we did it to her. Blonde attempts to paint a more multidimensional picture of the late tragic star than the many images of her that populate our collective memory, but focusing exclusively on the many ways she was a victim simply reduces her to a different type of simplistic caricature.

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