by Heath Lynch, Contributing Writer
Outside of the craziness surrounding Don’t Worry Darling, you would be hard-pressed to find a more controversial film this awards season than Blonde, although there’s a very clear distinction between these two films. The former is controversial for its offscreen issues with its cast and crew, whereas the latter is controversial for issues within the film itself. Blonde is a brand new film written and directed by Andrew Dominik of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford fame. His screenplay is an adaptation of a book of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which in and of itself is a fictionalized biography of one of the most famous actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Marilyn Monroe. That’s right, this is a fictional adaptation, of a fictional biography, of a real life, that happens to be a beloved icon. Messiness was inevitable — it was always going to come down to how the mess would be mitigated. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Blonde is well-founded. While there are technical cinematic achievements to appreciate, and Ana de Armas is delivering an exceptional performance that the movie doesn’t deserve, the sloppiness of the screenplay mixed with the disgusting portrayal and exploitation of Monroe’s life makes Blonde an uncomfortably hollow experience.
This new nightmare fantasy biopic follows Norma Jeane (de Armas), an emotionally and physically abused young girl, as she grows up and evolves into the famous actress Marilyn Monroe. It follows the well publicized trials and tribulations of her life that have only grown in legend in the decades since her passing. This includes her breakout role as Nell and Don’t Bother to Knock, and other films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. It also covers her relationships with “Cass” Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and “Eddy” Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), her marriage to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), and her marriage to Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody). Of course, unfortunately, that means it also covers her addiction to pills, her hallucinations, and her tragic death at an incredibly young age.
Let’s not bury the lede. This movie exploits de Armas, and therefore exploits Monroe herself.
The film may operate from Monroe’s perspective, as it angles for a feminist take on her life with its themes, but the direction and editing choices very clearly have an uncomfortable male gaze. Dominik takes every opportunity he can to showcase de Armas in the most sexually explicit ways he can get achieve with his NC-17 rating without directly showing intercourse. He shoots de Armas topless, if not completely nude, for almost a third of the film’s runtime, even if it’s during a scene where it makes no sense for de Armas to be naked. But it’s not just that de Armas is naked so often, it’s the content that’s most disturbing. This isn’t Monroe at a pin-up photo shoot, no. These are shots intentionally set at a bad angle just to get nipples in frame. There is a segment dedicated to a close-up of de Armas being forced to deep throat. There are repeated depictions of sexual assault and rape. There is an inherent understanding that some of this content might be necessary to accurately tell this story, but how these scenes are shot, and how long they linger, greatly alters the necessity of such content.
Dominik’s narrow-minded interpretation of the novel leads to a one-note screenplay by proxy. Everything ties back to sex. Every scene that is not about sex, or is not directly sexual in nature, is affected by her status as a sex symbol. This inability to have any nuance to the narrative focus of the film is a big part of what makes everything feel so disgusting. When Monroe is forced to reminisce about how she got into the movie business, we revert to a flashback of rape. When she has aspirations of being a mother, she holds herself back due to her career as a sexual iconic that can’t be jeopardized, and due to fear of passing on a trait of her mother who the film insinuates was a prostitute, and that Monroe was a product of said prostitution. When Monroe starts having nervous breakdowns and mass hallucinations that trigger pill-popping episodes, it’s all because of unrequited love from a father who is not a part of her life. So she copes with this by calling every lover and in her life Daddy. Is any of this accurate? Who knows, but that relentless sexuality is how this movie portrays it. Monroe’s whole existence revolves around sex; it’s inescapable.
This is the heart of the controversy, and it would be disingenuous to not address it right at the top of this review. It is where most of the anger and resentment towards this feature is coming from, and it’s warranted. You can only watch Marilyn Monroe be sexually abused, and Ana de Armas shown so insensitively, before you become numb to the movie as a whole when you realize it has nothing new to say. It just keeps saying the same thing over and over in incredibly exploitative fashion.
There’s an inkling of a kernel of a nugget of an idea that this movie is more than just sex. As mentioned earlier, there are attempts at feminism here. Commentary on the patriarchy, abuses of power, and more. Dominik is also trying to say something about how Hollywood likes to churn out its stars, putting people through the meat grinder and dehumanizing them in the process. With the revelations about Harvey Weinstein and so many other producers, directors, and figures of power in Hollywood, it’s clear that Dominik wanted to have a conversation about these systemic issues that have been going on for decades. There’s also commentary on celebrity culture: the idolization of our movie stars, and the inadvertent and unnecessary trauma that can bring to their lives. It’s easy to forget sometimes that these are just normal people. Regular human beings who are no different than you and me, they just happen to have a career in which all of us can see them, all the time. All of this was just as important in the ‘50s during the height of Monroe’s career as it is today. But even these worthwhile inklings of kernels of nuggets of ideas don’t require de Armas naked. But it happens anyway.
There is one aspect of this film that is truly spectacular and saves it from being borderline unwatchable, and that’s de Armas’s spectacular performance. If you weren’t already impressed by her work in Knives Out and Blade Runner 2049, then this should seal the deal. This undoubtedly makes her one of the early favorites for awards consideration at the dawn of this new award season. I wouldn’t be shocked at all to hear her name come Oscar nominations. While the screenplay doesn’t give her the most to work with, as many scenes are written in redundant fashion, she manages to take every crappy line of dialogue and underdeveloped scene and turn it into something special. It’s very clear that she took the time to study Monroe’s mannerisms and vocal cadence. Even with her natural accent, she still does a stellar job of sounding just like Monroe, and her physical movements match Monroe to uncanny levels. The way she’s able to recreate scenes from some of these classic movies is astounding. Then there’s her pure understanding and portrayal of complex emotions. Whether it’s the horror in her eyes at seeing visions of a baby being caught in a fire as a metaphor for abortion, the pain of paternal abandonment that seeps into her line readings during a film audition, her jovial bravado that she puts on as a front to mask her pain when she’s at a photo shoot, or the duality that she deals with every day as she contemplates who’s more in control of her world her life, Norma Jean or Marilyn Monroe, de Armas is a powerhouse of acting talent. She deserves every single accolade coming her way.
The supporting cast around de Armas is doing a decent job, but no one is ever really given a moment to shine. Most characters are just not there long enough to make a real impact. Another fault of the screenplay. These are usually portrayed as one-note caricatures of who they actually were as people. Cannavale does a decent job as DiMaggio, but there’s no variance to him. He’s just an abusive husband who doesn’t want his wife to make movies. Julianne Nicholson portrays Monroe’s mom, but they don’t give her anything to do either, other than attempt to drown her daughter. Yikes. The worst is easily Caspar Phillipson’s portrayal of John F. Kennedy, who is there for one scene just to sexually assault Monroe. It’s awful. The only person who’s delivering anything here is Brody as Arthur Miller. But that’s simply due to him getting the most screen time. His character is still fairly limited to just being a supportive husband. Hell, we don’t even see how their relationship ends. The script mishandles so many relationships, in fact. This movie doesn’t even mention Monroe’s first marriage. The second marriage is presented as the first instead, and it just immediately blends into her third marriage in back-to-back scenes. We also never get any conclusion to what happened with the ending of the third marriage. Characters are just dropped entirely. Storylines end out of nowhere with no resolution as to what happened, why, or how anyone was affected after the fact.
I will applaud some of the technical elements throughout this film that were quite engaging. In an ongoing march towards artistic originality, the film continues to throw changeups and curveballs at the audience by constantly switching aspect ratios. It also offers many psychedelic, surreal interpretations of reality, and even changes its color palette quite frequently. The movie opts to transition between black and white and color on a seemingly random basis. While I respect the ambition, it feels a little overbearing and pretentious. It comes off more like a director saying, “Look what I can do!” versus actually doing something because it would improve the quality of the film. But with that said, a lot of the cinematography is quite beautiful. Credit to Chayse Irvin for that. Additionally, there’s some really solid production design and art direction throughout this film. There are entire segments that painstakingly recreate the Golden Age of Hollywood. The costume design matches that level of excellence, if not exceeds it. Even the original score at times feels quite haunting, as well as the sound design. In some ways it reminds me of last year’s Spencer in how it often felt like a horror film. It was a refreshing atmosphere given the dark subject matter.
However, this editing leaves much to be desired because there is no reason that this film should have lasted 166 minutes. As discussed earlier, you can only watch Monroe be sexually violated so much, or do so many drugs, before you become numb to the movie itself. At some point you have to learn to make cuts. Delivering a series of beautiful images is not enough to justify a run time of this nature.
I was really looking forward to this film. Unfortunately, it is inherently disrespectful to Monroe and uncomfortable to watch. Its vapid and shallow interpretation of feminism does not accomplish enough to overtake the overwhelming sense of raw sexual exploitation on display throughout. The film is directly contributing to exactly what it claims it’s trying to prevent. While many will get appreciation out of the de Armas performance, and there are certainly a ton of technical achievements to be impressed by, overall the juice is just not worth the squeeze. If you’re absolutely a devout Monroe fan, or a de Armas fan, I guess you could check this out. But unless this is something that you absolutely feel you need to see, you’re probably better off avoiding it entirely.
Score: 5/10
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