Blonde
It’s a false choice to go into a film about a historical figure, and expect authenticity and accuracy in the telling of that person’s life. Hollywood has always been about myth making, and exaggeration of reality. The important thing is to bring something thematically, and narratively, illuminating to the table when bringing that person’s life to the screen. For all the bluster about Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde”- and, in particular, it’s NC-17 rating- it does neither of those things, and in a way that just grated on me by the end of this film’s 166 minute running time.
Marilyn Monroe has never really meant much to me as an icon. Yes, I’ve heard “Candle in the Wind,” I’ve seen a couple of her films, and I watched the Michelle Williams film, “My Week With Marilyn.” I wasn’t that invested in the idea of seeing another film about Monroe beyond the fact that Dominik is a filmmaker of note (even if he hasn’t done much for me), and the star of the film, Ana de Armes, is a captivating up-and-comer after “Knives Out” and “No Time to Die.” Only one of them comes out halfway decently on the other side of this adaptation of the controversial historical fiction novel by Joyce Carol Oates; de Armes gives us a good portrayal of a woman unhinged by lifelong misery. I don’t think I know anything more about Monroe after this film beyond what has been projected on her by Oates and Dominik, and those projections are ugly and rooted in awful pop psychology tropes.
Anyone with any interest in Hollywood at all as a topic of discussion understands that it’s been rooted in horrific, systemic abuse of women from jump street. There is no question that Marilyn Monroe was one of those victims. In “Blonde,” Dominik is not afraid of giving us an up close look at that abuse, whether it’s from a studio executive like Darryl Zanuck (David Warshofsky), “friends” like Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Edward Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), or men in general, including President Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) in a late scene that might be the most degrading sequence in recent memory. The film’s NC-17 rating is justified, but the content it earns it for is not meaningful to any thematic purpose- it feels like it’s intended to shock and startle, and nothing more. Marilyn is shown topless a lot, and sure, some of it can be waved off as, “Well, people are often naked at home,” but it still feels gratuitous and exploitative in the larger film. If Dominik had used this narrative to put the system on blast for how it abused Monroe, or to comment on how that system has continued to exploit women like Harvey Weinstein’s victims or Britney Spears, for example, that would be one thing; instead, it wallows in Marilyn’s misery, not to mention justifies it (in my opinion) by constant references to her absentee father, who- in the film’s telling- was always concerned for her in letters he would write, but at a distance. Her mentally unbalanced mother (Julianne Nicholson) always told her he was big and important, giving her an image of him as a dashing movie star. That stuck with Marilyn, and the film seems to paint her public image as a reflection of her desire to be wanted by that elusive father figure, including having her call her husbands in the film (The Ex-Player (Joe DiMaggio, played by Bobby Cannavale) and The Playwright (Arthur Miller, played by Adrian Brody)) “daddy.” It’s disgusting, and further disrespects Monroe, and women in general.
There are filmmaking choices in “Blonde” that baffle me. It’s become a frequent choice for filmmakers to opt for shooting in 1.37:1 framing, and Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin do so here, but they also move to widescreen formats as well. That’s fine as a choice- a lot of filmmakers do that, as well- but it doesn’t feel like there’s a particular rhyme or reason for the aspect ratio changes. They aren’t reflective of a specific period of Marilyn’s life, or particular events (except for one use of 1.00:1 that does work), but simply a desire to make the film feel artistically-minded, and to show off. The same goes for the film going between black-and-white and color. There are striking images in both- an early Hollywood wild fire is powerfully shown in color, and the black-and-white works for the film’s final moments- but again, there’s no particular reason for the back-and-forth besides showing off. For almost three hours, having the film do this is a headache, not helped by the fact that the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is grating. As you know, I’m a fan of experimental and challenging film scores, and I’ve been a fan of their work in the past, but like the filmmaking, the music just repels me in this film, and adds nothing of value to the emotional landscape the film wants to occupy.
One film I couldn’t help but think about after getting out of “Blonde” was Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”. That film explored a woman’s anxieties of not being seen or appreciated in a complex, sometimes harrowing way, but did so in a way that didn’t feel disrespectful of the character, or the emotional Hell she found herself in. It empathized with Jennifer Lawrence’s character, which is more than I can say “Blonde” does for Monroe. The film shows multiple times where Marilyn is pregnant, and each time, it is taken from her, sometimes in horrific fashion. (We get two POV shots from her vagina, and yes, they are just as upsetting as that sounds.) This film is not subtle about what it thinks it wants to get at; that’s not always a bad thing, but in the case of a film about a real person, it certainly doesn’t feel like the best thing to do. “Blonde” is a blunt instrument of a movie, hitting us over the head with its ideas until we feel bludgeoned by the time the credits roll. There has to be a better, more profound way to learn something from the troubled life of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic stars.
