A film review by Craig J. Koban October 11, 2022

BLONDE ½

2022, NC-17, 166 mins.

Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane  /  Adrien Brody as The Playwright  /  Bobby Cannavale as The Ex-Athlete  /  Sara Paxton as Miss Flynn  /  Julianne Nicholson as Gladys  /  Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin  /  Caspar Phillipson as The President  /  Evan Williams as Eddy G. Robinson Jr.  /  Rebecca Wisocky as Yvet  /  Toby Huss as Whitey  /  Catherine Dent as Jean  /  Haley Webb as Brooke  /  Eden Riegel as Esther  /  Tygh Runyan as Father  /  David Warshofsky as Mr. Z  /  Lily Fisher as Young Norma Jeane  /  Michael Masini as Tony Curtis  /  Ned Bellamy as Doc Fell  /  Sonny Valicenti as Casting Director  /  Skip Pipo as Dr. Bender  /  Mia McGovern Zaini as Young Norma Jeane

Discussing this film in any detail without delving into key scenes and reveals proved to be problematic for me, so consider this review one with spoilers.

ORIGINAL FILM

Netflix's NC-17 rated BLONDE professes to be about Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe - or, at least a fictionalized version of her life and times, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates - but I don't see much of a thoughtful celebration/examination of this troubled celebrity's life at all.  

No, director Andrew Dominik - who previously made one of the most atmospheric and underrated films of the 2000s in THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD - has made a film that seems fetishistically obsessed with showing every possible manner that Monroe suffered during her relatively brief time in the world.  And the iconic silver screen sex symbol had anything but a squeaky clean existence, yes, but in BLONDE she's a living, breathing punching bag for an inexcusably long near three hour running time.  The essential sin of Dominik's film is that it marginalizes Monroe to essentially the most unsavory and sensationalistic ordeals that plagued her, and that's what makes it one of the sleaziest and most exploitative biopics that I've seen in an awfully long time.

There are only two things that hold BLONDE back from being a worst of the year candidate: 

Firstly, star Ana de Armas gives it her all as Monroe.  

Secondly, the film is staggeringly well shot and composed. 

Beyond that, BLONDE is an endurance testing examination of human pain.  The fact that this film is NC-17 is kind of ironic:  It's more outright pornographic in terms of the voyeuristic extremes it takes in degrading this woman than it is with any matters of actual titillation and eroticism.   

And - yeah, yeah - this is a "fictionalized biography" (which, uh huh, is kind of an oxymoron), but there's no loving attention paid to what Monroe brought to the movies and gave her fans in any respect.  There have been many previous attempts at chronicling her life - like the good, but somewhat problematic MY WEEK WITH MARILYN - but this one seems less like a traditional narrative of her times and more like a series of loosely assembled and experimentally handled  vignettes that show this woman being ridiculed, tormented, abused, and victimized by everyone from her mentally unstable mother to Hollywood producers to the many men that she married (she was married three times by the time she was 30).  If the mission of BLONDE was to thoroughly embrace the most hellish aspects of Monroe's misery, then I guess mission: accomplished.  I would say, though, that legendary Hollywood performers need a take that tries to demythologize them to a degree so that viewers can relate to them on some sort of humanized level, and Dominik aims for that, but the result is a film that's so tawdry and sick minded that there's no time or room for truly getting into the inner psychology of this woman and fully flesh her out.  And that's a massive shame. 

BLONDE opens with Monroe's childhood as Norma Jean Baker (played in these sections by Lily Fisher), and it's just the beginning of the unending horrors to come for this little girl on her road to superstardom.  She's brutally abused by her mentally sick mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), and with no father figure in her life, poor Norma Jean really has to fend for herself at a very young and sensitive age.  When her momma gets sent to an insane asylum, Norma Jean does receive letters from her biological father, but he still declines at meeting her face-to-face, which causes added anxiety for the already suffering girl.  From here we flashforward to adulthood when Norma Jean has adopted what would become her world famous Marilyn Monroe stage name (de Armas), and from this point on the real anguish that she's subjected to time and time again gets methodically hammered home.  We see her early screen testing sessions and how one producer essentially forces sex on her on his casting couch.  Her many male directors treat her like a sexualized prop instead of a person.  When she can't deal with the pressures of fame in the movies she gorges on pills prescribed by studio doctors to calm her down and make her camera ready.  When she's not shown in her less-than-glamorous movie life we bare witness to her many aforementioned failed marriages, like one with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannivale), who starts off seemingly sensitive minded and caring, but becomes a violent lout.  She later married renowned playwright Arthur Miller (a subdued Adrien Brody), who's never shown abusing her, but became embroiled in the worst period of her booze and drug addictions.  We do see some recreations of her most memorable movies and scenes from them and the hostile behind-the-scenes working relationship she had with director Billy Wilder.  And then we have her ties to President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) in a scene that nearly made me want to break my own movie screening rule of never walking out on a movie (or in this case, stopping a stream) before it's over.  

But this moment was nearly my breaking point. 

Actually, before I get to that scene of horrendous bad taste, let me touch on another equally tasteless element: BLONDE presents Monroe's various pregnancies that were doomed in one way or another, with abortion be utilized.  Dominik is so ruthless in his insensitivity handling of it.  At multiple points, he employs nightmarishly icky POV shots from the inside of Monroe's vagina while the procedure is being done on her (or forced on her).  I found this stylistic choice both cruelly invasive and utterly unnecessary.  Getting back to her time with JFK, it's presented in a sequence that seems viciously unfair to the parties in question.  We see a doped up Monroe being literally carried like an animal to the President's hotel room ("Am I meant to be delivered?!" she screams) and when she's dumped off there he's laying half naked on a bed sporting a back brace.  He's also on the phone dealing with a potential scandal in the making.  He then informs her that he has had "one hell of a day" and grabs her hand and thrusts it to his groin.  When she fails to stimulate him this way, he then grabs her head and forces her into fellatio, calling her degrading names like "slut" in the process.  In a lingering shot that seemingly goes on forever (and what probably led to the film's NC-17 rating), we get an extreme close-up of Monroe's face as she performs oral sex on Kennedy.  It goes on for nearly two minutes.  The sickening casualness that BLONDE takes with this scene is really telling.  Watching Monroe coerced into a forced BJ while she's crying and engaging in a panic-stricken inner dialogue about what she's doing is just ugly, not to mention that JFK is shown as a cold blooded and borderline psychopathic bully.  A properly realized examination of Monroe might have explored her well rumored and infamous relationship with JFK, but BLONDE has no room whatsoever for that.  This scene, and the film in general, reduces its subject to the most humiliating extremes possible.  

It should be noted, however, that BLONDE doesn't make all of the men around Monroe toxic a-holes.  Arthur Miller is shown as relatively kindly, but perhaps in over his head when he was married to her.  Arguably, Monroe's only meaningful relationship occurs pre-marriage with two Hollywood hunks in Cass (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy (Evan Williams), who are the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edgar G. Robinson respectively and have their own unique prerogatives on fame.  The two also give Monroe her some semblance of love and acceptance, but even they seem to have darker sides buried beneath (I could have handled a whole film about this highly unique and intriguing three way romance).  If there is a further compliment that I would pay Dominik in his approach to BLONDE then it would be that he avoids falling into obligatory celebrity biopic conventions.  The film's overall narrative handling and aesthetic choices are thoroughly unconventional as Dominik flexes his muscles when it comes to being inventive with the grammar and syntax of these types of dime-a-dozen genre efforts.  He freely moves from old school 1.33:1 aspect ratios shot in luminous, dreamlike black and white and then into vibrant hued widescreen compositions...and back and forth when needed.  When we see Monroe as a child the scenes are lensed with muted sepia tones.  Dominik's technique is also pretty spot on when it comes to re-creating scenes from many of Monroe's most cherished films and the more hypnotizing allure that she evoked in front of a camera.  On a level of pure filmmaking craft, BLONDE is pretty astounding to look at throughout and is as exquisitely shot as any film from 2022.    

But, alas, Domink's film is all style and virtually no substance, and even though the film is impressive eye candy his art house self-indulgence does suffocate the proceedings and, well, Monroe herself.  She was most assuredly a sex symbol the likes of which will probably never be duplicated in the history of the movies, but BLONDE is simplistically focused on the tragedies of that status.  She was with us for just 36 years, and this film makes those 36 years one of unspeakable indignities.  The Monroe here is a sufferer, and even in small moments when she appears content the movie subjects us to more and more abject misery.  There's a real conundrum at play in BLONDE: I can sense that Dominik is trying, again, to recontextualize this unparalleled cultural icon by showing her rise to fame with an aggressive warts and all approach, but in the process the film becomes unhealthily fixated on the cruelty she endured before she was found naked and dead of a drug overdose in 1962.  I didn't sense any genuine honoring of Monroe or the things she accomplished in her all-too-brief career. 

Poor Anna de Armas.  The Cuban-born actress is quite good in what's probably the most publicized role of her career.  And even though there are times when she's a physical dead ringer for Monroe (and other times...not so much) and her native accent distractingly slips through here and there, you still gain an immediate impression that she's deep dive committing herself to making  Monroe as grounded and authentic as possible.  And that's no easy feat when the rest of the film - and Dominik's frequently overzealous excesses - around her fails to do this good performance justice.  De Armas is BLONDE's saving grace and is primarily responsible for me making it through this film's fatiguing 165 minutes.  There is a great movie to be made of Monroe's life, and one that both champions her stature in Hollywood history and isn't afraid to peel back the many enigmatic layers of this starlet to get to her real - and problematic - core.  BLONDE may look sensational and has a capable and determined actress at the helm, but those are just surface pleasures that can't mask this film's repulsive heart of darkness.   

When I finished watching the film I was reminded of something the late Roger Ebert said: "When I was a teenager, we went to the movies to see how adults lived.  Now kids go to the movies to see how they die."