After years of gestation and months of hype, Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde debuts on Netflix on a wave of… mixed feelings. Very mixed. About as mixed as feelings get. On one hand, it’s about one of the most beloved Hollywood figures in history, who’s played by Ana de Armas, the wildly talented star with greatness behind her (Knives Out! Blade Runner 2049!) and surely ahead of her. On the other, the film is 167 minutes long, it inspired fuss over its NC-17 rating – for prolific nudity and an upsetting rape scene, for starters – and it’s directed with unapologetic artsiness by love-him-or-hate-him filmmaker Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), who adapts Joyce Carol Oates fictional novel of the same title. The verdict? Well, let’s get into it and come up with one.
BLONDE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Marilyn isn’t Marilyn yet – she’s just little Norma Jeane (Lily Fisher). She’s about seven years old when the tragedy of her life begins its course: Her mother (Julianne Nicholson) tells her she’ll never know her father. Her mother drives them toward a Hollywood Hills fire instead of away from it. Her mother tells a policeman, “I wish you would just shoot me.” Her mother tries to drown her in the bathtub. Her mother is institutionalized. Norma Jeane ends up in an orphanage and then abruptly it’s a decade or so later when she’s now Marilyn (de Armas), on magazine covers and pin-ups and losing herself in acting class, where she crouches on the stage, sobbing, as concerned classmates look on. Or maybe they’re just puzzled. There’s something disempathetic in their eyes. Actually, there’s something disempathetic in everyone’s eyes in this movie. Everyone’s except Marilyn’s, of course.
Marilyn visits her mother in the mental hospital. Marilyn auditions for an acting part. Marilyn is crudely bent over a desk by a cretinous producer. Marilyn meets Eddy Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) and Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel), and they climb into bed together and they’re distorted and stretched on screen as they commingle. A low angle captures her on the edge of a bed with the two men on either side of her and the shot dissolves into a portrait of a rushing waterfall. She truly seems to enjoy their company but her career is taking off and the unusual relationship is in the tabloids and so it’s over. She still thinks about her father.
Marilyn learns she’s pregnant, and we meet her CGI fetus in several close-us. But Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is on the agenda so her choice is taken away from her. The brightest lights aren’t on the set or at the red carpet but behind the doctor inside the clinic where she’s flat on her back with her legs in the stirrups. She’s the only one not smiling during the premiere. “For this you killed your baby,” she whispers as the theater erupts into applause. Did I mention she earned a fraction of what the men in the film made? She gets a letter from her father.
She meets “The Ex-Athlete” (Bobby Cannavale), who we know is Joe DiMaggio, so why are we playing that game? They marry, but he’s a cold, jealous, abusive shit who’s the only one unhappy with The Seven Year Itch – there’s a massive throng of titillated men hooting and cheering as the draft blows up her dress and it’s strangely gross and poetic at the same time, and there’s “The Ex-Athlete” grimacing among the crowd. That night, he’ll clench his fist. Time passes. She marries “The Playwright” (Adrien Brody), who we know is Arthur Miller, so we’re still playing that game. She doesn’t fit in with his crowd. She hasn’t fit in anywhere. She’s an island no matter where she goes. Isolated, at sea. She gets pregnant, we see another CGI fetus, she miscarries, pills and champagne and a breakdown during Some Like it Hot. Another time jump; this time it’s “The President,” JFK (Caspar Phillipson), always under the eye of Secret Service men, who really keep some secrets. By the way, did you notice how she always calls her male lovers “Daddy”?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: And the award for Most Divisive Biopic of a Famous Woman With a Tragic Life goes to Blonde, beating out Spencer and Jackie, which aren’t quite as pretentiously artsy in the way they bend over backwards to subvert the biopic formula.
Performance Worth Watching: There really are no performances in this movie outside of de Armas’, who’s recklessly vulnerable in her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe as being, well, recklessly vulnerable. You can’t help but admire a bravura performance like this, even in an overblown mess of a movie.
Memorable Dialogue: Marilyn is on set. Marilyn is acting. Marilyn pulls a razor blade from its package and holds it against her neck. Marilyn’s director: “Annnnnd cut!”
Sex and Skin: Scads of nudity; scenes of sexual assault; does an abortion shot from inside Marilyn’s body count?
Our Take: Blonde is miserable. Joyless. A checklist of traumas for de Armas to work through. All complexity is stripped from this fictional portrayal of Marilyn Monroe, here propped up as a perpetual victim of screaming and brutal Toxic Masculinity, which defines her from the moment her father abandoned her mother to the male doctor who prescribed her all the sedative injections and pills that eventually killed her. That’s almost certainly true about Marilyn, but is there more to this woman? Did Norma Jeane craft her Marilyn Monroe persona? Is she passionate about what she does? Is she aware that her work was about so much more than selling her sexpot image, that it was meaningful, thoughtful, delightful art and entertainment?
I’m not griping that Blonde makes me feel retroactively guilty for enjoying Some Like it Hot – let’s not be myopic here. The business of film was (and still can be) ugly and exploitative. That’s no secret, or a revelation; we have no choice but to live with some uncomfortable truths. But Dominik hammers his point home with self-important, self-serious conspicuousness: All those scenes of Marilyn feeling alone in a roomful of people. All those shots of (occasionally talking!) fetuses that never breathed air or saw sunlight. All those instances of abuse, exploitation, injustice, cruelty, indifference, victimization and enablement – often as de Armas is barely clothed – buffered with barely a scant whiff of hope, joy or humor. It’s a record skipping on anguish, anguish, anguish, anguish. For nearly three hours.
There’s no denying that Dominik throws everything he’s got at this picture. Name a visual style, and he uses it: wide-angle, black-and-white, color, handheld, POV. It’s a collage of nightmarish provocation – distorted faces, hallucinations blurring with reality, shots that are measurable millimeters from pornography. There’s no denying the brutal effectiveness of individual scenes, but taken within the context of such a one-note film, they feel gross, obvious and indulgent. Dominik has no use for typical biopics, and frankly, neither should we. But this is something else entirely. What, exactly, is he trying to say? If Only She’d Had a Father? (If so, ugh.) The world is cruel, and rarely so cruel as it was to Marilyn Monroe? Who knows – and it’s not worth enduring this junk to find out.
Our Call: SKIP IT. There’s little getting around how Blonde uses myriad visual textures to reduce a complex public figure down to a few composite parts. Yuck.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.