Blonde - Netflix Marilyn Monroe Biopic starring Ana de Armas Rated NC-17

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“Blonde” Is “The Passion of the Christ” for Marilyn Monroe​

The film has a single idea—that Monroe was a victim—and is happy to victimize her, over and over.

Even if “Blonde,” written and directed by Andrew Dominik, had offered a sympathetic and discerning view of the private life of Marilyn Monroe, it would have been a cinematic disaster. The movie is ridiculously vulgar—the story of Monroe as if it were channelled through Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” The character endures an overwhelming series of relentless torments that, far from arousing fear and pity, reflect a special kind of directorial sadism. In an effort to decry the protagonist’s sufferings, “Blonde” wallows in them. It depicts Monroe as the plaything of her times, her milieu, and her fate, by way of turning her into the filmmaker’s own plaything. The very subject of the film is the deformation of Monroe’s personality and artistry by Hollywood studio executives and artists; in order to tell that story, Dominik replicates it in practice.

“Blonde,” adapted from the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates, has a single idea: that, throughout her life, Monroe was victimized. The child Norma Jeane Mortenson (played by Lily Fisher) is the victim of her father, who never wanted her; of her mother (Julianne Nicholson), who is mentally ill; of neighbors who deliver her to an orphanage. As a young woman, she’s the victim of photographers who take pictures of her in the nude. As Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas), she is the victim of a studio boss, Mr. Z (David Warshofsky), who rapes her and then rewards her with roles; of an agent who crafts her persona and forces her to conform to it; of producers and directors who underpay her and stereotype her as sexy and dumb; of her two lovers in a threesome, who use and abuse her confidences. She is the victim of her two husbands during her years of fame: Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), who wants her not to work, is fiercely jealous, and is physically abusive; and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who vampirizes her for his work. She is sexually assaulted by President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson); she is abused by the Secret Service on his behalf. (The movie doesn’t name DiMaggio or Kennedy but identifies them unambiguously by their traits and their roles in Monroe’s life.)

Paparazzi and the press intrude on her private life. Her adoring fans are slobbering perverts who demand her sexiness onscreen and her grateful adoration in public appearances. They mistake her Marilyn Monroe persona for her real self, even though she considers it a pure product for public consumption, having little to do with her real personality. The movie’s emblematic moment shows her looking at a photo of herself—of Marilyn Monroe—in a magazine and saying, “She is pretty, but she isn’t me.” Yet the film never gets close to suggesting who, indeed, the real person is.

The movie presents Marilyn as a thrillingly talented actor who, long before her experience with the Actors Studio, delves deep into personal experience and emotional memory to deliver performances of a shocking intensity. It also indicates that Hollywood offers little outlet for that artistry, and, instead, corners her into roles centered on her sexual allure. It presents her as a well-read, thoughtful, and insightful actor whose artistic ideal and dream remain the theatre, and—in the movie’s best scene—she explains why. During her first date with DiMaggio, she tells him that she wants to leave Hollywood for New York, to study acting, to learn to be a great actress, and to do theatre (above all, Chekhov), because acting in the movies is “cut cut cut.” She adds, “It’s a jigsaw puzzle, but you’re not the one to put the pieces together.” It’s true that acting in movies and onstage are entirely different, and those who are good at one aren’t necessarily well suited to the other. “Blonde” doesn’t display the difference but merely asserts it; the film only winks and nods in the general direction of what Marilyn might have achieved onstage.

Movies may well be “cut cut cut,” and Dominik inflicts some uniquely unkind ones on the character of Marilyn. He omits what ought to have been a prime moment of theatrical bravura, at Marilyn’s first class at the Actors Studio, where she’s put onstage to read the lead role in a play by Miller, who’s there watching skeptically, dubious of the Hollywood diva’s ability to perform the complex role to his satisfaction. Instead, she elicits her classmates’ wild applause and Miller’s stunned admiration and tears of emotion. But that performance itself? Not a second of it is shown.

There isn’t anything about the real-life Monroe’s politics, including her defiance of the press and the studio to marry Miller (who was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his former links to the Communist Party), her conversion to Judaism, and her own activism (including against nuclear weapons). There isn’t anything about the control that Monroe took over her own career by forming a production company in order to choose and develop her own projects; there isn’t anything about her early enthusiasm for movies or her discovery of modelling. (The movie skips from the child Norma Jeane’s arrival at an orphanage to a rapid montage of the teen-ager’s photos in magazines.) There’s nothing of her effort to escape from poverty and drudgery, her serious and thoughtful efforts to develop her career; not a word about Monroe’s extremely hard work as an actress, or her obsessive dependence, for seven or eight years, on her acting coach Natasha Lytess. In short, whatever has to do with Monroe’s devotion to her art and her attention to her business is relegated to the thinnest of margins.

The movie does insist, by way of a handful of scenes, that the character of Marilyn is an intelligent and insightful actor, yet “Blonde” reduces to an indicative, forensic minimum the scenes in which she expresses sharp ideas and discerning thoughts. For instance, Marilyn says, en route to her catastrophic visit to J.F.K. in a hotel room, that there’s nothing sexual about their relationship. But what went on between them in the encounters before the one in which he attacks her is completely absent. If she had a social life apart from her relationships with men, whether Kennedy, DiMaggio, Miller, or a pair of lovers—Charlie Chaplin, Jr. (Xavier Samuel), and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams), with whom she’s shown in a threesome—Dominik is uninterested in it.



The problem isn’t just what Dominik doesn’t imagine but what he does. He directs as if he defines poetry as using ten vague words where three clear ones would suffice, and then transfers that misconception to images. In order to approximate a sense of subjectivity, of Marilyn’s states of mind, he relies on images that are out of focus (but not so much that they’re truly obscure), a soundtrack that submerges voices in aquatic murk (but not completely), slow-motion scenes to underline feelings without developing them, a palette that flips back and forth between color and black-and-white (her life sometimes seems to her like a movie—get it?).

But such floppy approximations are trivial alongside Dominik’s more garish and demonstrative tricks. When Marilyn becomes pregnant, it’s through one of the most sophomoric effects I’ve ever seen. She spends an evening outdoors with the two Juniors, talking astrology while looking up at a sky full of stars that begin to move and then morph into squiggling sperm. Her fetus is then shown in the womb, and that fetus returns to the movie repeatedly, in C.G.I. fetus follies that ultimately involve it speaking to her. Marilyn gets an abortion, in order to act in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; this is traumatic, as is a later miscarriage and another, vaguely suggested subsequent abortion. Through all of these episodes, the straining for poignancy and subjectivity is done crudely and callously. A view upward and out, from the point of view of Marilyn’s vagina toward the abortionist, evokes Dominik’s own violation and misuse of the character’s body. Amid such grotesquerie and such vulgarity, de Armas’s performance alone, energetic and nuanced, lends the film a modicum of dignity.

Other such effects and gimmicks throughout the film trivialize its ostensible import and render its grim torment ridiculous. For instance, when Kennedy comes in Marilyn’s mouth, the TV in his room shows a clip of a rocket blasting off and shots (seemingly taken from “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”) in which alien spacecraft explode against the Washington Monument and the Capitol. Marilyn’s lifelong quest for her father culminates in his face—the face of the man whom her mother called her father—being projected into the sky at the moment of her death. When Marilyn’s songs from her movies are clipped onto the soundtrack, they’re ones that feature the word “daddy,” as from “Ladies of the Chorus,” and “baby,” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” You’ve got to hand it to Dominik: he doesn’t only outdo the ostensibly crass showmen of classic Hollywood in overt artistic ambition but also in cheap sentiment, brazen tastelessness, and sexual exploitation.
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www.newyorker.com

“Blonde” Is “The Passion of the Christ” for Marilyn Monroe

The film has a single idea—that Monroe was a victim—and is happy to victimize her, over and over.
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
 
Dave24

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Critical response​

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Blonde holds an approval rating of 57% based on 76 reviews, with an average of 6/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Blonde can be hard to watch as it teeters between commenting on exploitation and contributing to it, but Ana de Armas' luminous performance makes it difficult to look away."[38] On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the film has a score of 57 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[39]

Reviewing the film following its world premiere at Venice, where it received a fourteen-minute standing ovation, Catherine Bray of Empire praised Dominik's visual style and de Armas' performance, but found the film failed at demystifying Monroe's life, writing: "The portrait that this film paints of Monroe depicts a little girl lost, who repeatedly calls her lovers 'Daddy' and reacts to almost every new setback with the same tremulously teary ingénue's pout."[40] Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson called it a "fascinating alternative to the traditional biopic", commending the unconventional storytelling, direction, and de Armas' performance.[41] Deadline Hollywood's Damon Wise stated the film is an "astonishing" way to tell Monroe's life in a fictional sense, as it is "presented as a horror movie in the surreal, nightmarish style" comparable to the films of David Lynch, especially Mulholland Drive (2001).[9]

In GQ, Jack King's review also notes how the film shifts from a "traditional biopic" to "a movie unrelenting in its brutality".[42] In a three-star review for The Guardian, Leslie Felperin described the film as "ravishing, moving and intensely irritating", but ultimately "all a bit much".[43] IndieWire's Sophie Monks Kaufman called the film a "bizarre, miserablist biopic" and gave it a grade of "C+", admiring de Armas' performance and the cinematography, but criticizing Dominik's portrayal of Monroe: "Dominik critiques the world for reducing his subject down to her topline assets—and then treats her in exactly the same way. His Marilyn is a sexy, breathy blonde with daddy issues. And that's all, folks."[44]

"At times, the movie feels like a slaughterhouse seen from the animal's point of view" wrote Bilge Ebiri in his review for Vulture, remarking on the film's tendency to elicit strong reactions and emotions from an audience by putting together what he described as a "captivating and terrifying" jigsaw puzzle of Monroe's life.[45] Anthony Lane, in his review for The New Yorker, praised de Armas' performance and Dominik's visual style, but heavily criticized his portrayal of Monroe, ultimately concluding: "Bedazzling, overlong, and unjust, Blonde does a grave disservice to the woman whom it purports to honor."[46] In a negative review for Slant Magazine, Jake Cole echoed Lane's sentiment, stating: "Blonde…is the worst kind of feminism, one so absorbed in the desire to 'save' a woman that it victimizes her as much as possible to make its redemption of her that much more praiseworthy."[47]


Industry reception​

Joyce Carol Oates, the author of the novel on which the film is based, observed a rough cut of the film, and publicly stated: "I have seen the rough cut of Andrew Dominick's [sic] adaptation and it is startling, brilliant, very disturbing and perhaps most surprisingly an utterly 'feminist' interpretation... not sure that any male director has ever achieved anything [like] this."[48]

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred opposite de Armas in Knives Out (2019), and whose father, actor Tony Curtis, starred opposite Monroe in Some Like It Hot (1959) and is portrayed in the film, was impressed with de Armas' performance, after also seeing an early cut: "I dropped to the floor. I couldn't believe it. Ana was completely gone. She was Marilyn."[27] Brad Pitt, who co-produced the film via his Plan B banner praised de Armas' performance, saying "She is phenomenal in it. That's a tough dress to fill. It was 10 years in the making. It wasn't until we found Ana that we could get it across the finish line".[49] Actor Casey Affleck also praised the film, stating, "I've seen a couple of versions of Blonde and it's taken him [Dominik] a long time to get it out into the world. But that's just how he is. He's so slow with it. And it's an amazing, beautiful film."[50]


Casting backlash​

Upon the trailers' release, de Armas' casting as Monroe received some backlash as some viewers felt her ethnic background did not entirely match Monroe's, with complaints that she still maintained her native Cuban accent.[51][52][16] Monroe's official estate defended de Armas' casting, stating, "Marilyn Monroe is a singular Hollywood and pop culture icon that transcends generations and history. Any actor that steps into that role knows they have big shoes to fill. Based on the trailer alone, it looks like Ana was a great casting choice as she captures Marilyn's glamour, humanity and vulnerability. We can't wait to see the film in its entirety!"[53]


NC-17 rating​

Blonde sparked some controversy when its NC-17 rating was confirmed, raising concerns that it would be exploitative in its depiction of Monroe.[54][55] The film itself features graphic scenes of sexual abuse as well as Monroe experiencing a miscarriage.[9] In an article for Jezebel, Kady Ruth Ashcroft comments on how the rating's relationship with Monroe's enduring status as a sex symbol in pop culture prevents the film from achieving its goal of humanizing her, concluding: "Blonde's NC-17 rating is intended as both a warning and restriction as to who can handle the film's mature content. It also acts like a tease—just how scandalous was this sexpot's life anyways?—in a way that may prevent the movie from shrinking Monroe the myth back down to Norma Jean."[56]

Speaking on the rating in an interview with Screen Daily, Dominik stated "It's a demanding movie—it is what it is, it says what it says. And if the audience doesn't like it, that's the fukking audience's problem. It's not running for public office" and added, "If I look at an episode of Euphoria, it's far more graphic than anything going on in Blonde".[57] In an interview with fashion magazine L'Officiel Italia, de Armas echoed the sentiment, saying "I don't understand why it happened. I can cite a number of programs or movies that are much more explicit and with a lot more sexual content than Blonde. But to tell this story it's important to show all those moments in Marilyn's life that brought her to the end she did. It needs to be explained. In the cast everyone knew we should delve into unpleasant territory, it wasn't just up to me".[58] Delving into what Dominik's vision for the film was, de Armas told Rotten Tomatoes, "Andrew's ambitions were very clear from the start—to present a version of Marilyn Monroe's life through her lens. He wanted the world to experience what it actually felt like to not only be Marilyn, but also Norma Jeane. I found that to be the most daring, unapologetic, and feminist take on her story that I had ever seen." She added, "Our movie is not linear or conventional; it is meant to be a sensorial and emotional experience. The film moves along with her feelings and her experiences. There are moments when we are inside of her body and mind, and this will give the audience an opportunity to experience what it was like to be Norma and Marilyn at the same time."[/QUOTE]


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Blonde (2022 film) - Wikipedia

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