Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane/Marilyn
“BLONDE” My rating: B- (Netflix)
166 minutes | MPAA rating: NC-17
“Blonde” left me feeling…well, ambivalent.
I don’t regret giving 2 1/2 hours to Andrew Dominick’s film. But I’m not eager to see it a second time.
It’s extremely well-made, and leading lady Ana de Armas’ turn as Marilyn Monroe goes terrifyingly deep (an Oscar seems likely).
But while I found it interesting, I rarely found it compelling.
What does “Blonde” tell us about the iconic movie star that we didn’t already know?
What point is Dominik (whose earlier films “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and “Killing Them Softly” I loved) trying to make?
This is not a traditional biopic. It is based on a work of fiction (the novel by Joyce Carol Oates) and as such is a brew of historic fact and pure invention. At any given moment it’s hard to know if what we’re seeing ever actually happened.
We get real events like Monroe’s marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller (listed in the credits as the Ex-Athlete and The Playwright) and re-creations of scenes from her films. This is interspersed with pure fantasy (a talking embryo, dream sequences).
In the end it all comes down to de Armas, who downplays Marilyn’s sexuality in favor of her sensitivity and vulnerability. The film’s major conceit is that Marilyn Monroe never actually existed. She was the onscreen creation of Norma Jeane, a fatherless girl who was used/abused by men who acknowledged her beauty but not her intelligence or talent.
So, yeah, “Blonde” is a downer.
Little Norma Jeane has a crazy mom (Julianne Nicholson) who fills her daughter’s head with dreams about an absent father — allegedly a bigwig in the movies — who will one day come to rescue them both. (Small wonder the grown Norma Jeane refers to her husbands as “Daddy.”) At least once Mama tries to drown the girl in a bathtub.
Norma Jeane is sexually assaulted by the movie producer who gets her into the industry (the film ignores Monroe’s first marriage and her affair with her first agent), and is sexually degraded by a President of the United States. She is coerced into an abortion.
Based on that description you might expect “Blonde” to be a sad saga of victimization. And in fact the film has been accused of peddling abuse porn. (The film has been rated NC-17, though what you see is relatively tame…the worst abuse takes place just out of camera range.)
Well, I’d agree except for the way in which de Armas infuses her character with beauty. Not physical beauty (though there are times in the right light and with the right body language that you find yourself gasping in recognition) but with a tender and desperate need to love and be loved.
This side of Norma Jeane is beautifully exposed in the film’s Arthur Miller segment. Like the playwright (very well played by Adrian Brody), we find ourselves falling for this woman’s combination of unexpected intelligence and childlike openness. There’s a genuinely sweetness to these moments that is matched by nothing else in the film.
Instead we get ambiguity. This is reflected even in Domiik’s technical choices. The movie drifts between color and black-and-white passages…but I’m damned if I can figure out what either signifies. If all the dream sequences, say, were in black-and-white you could sense what the director is going for. But, no, it all seems terribly arbitrary.
My bottom line: A great heartfelt performance anchoring a half-baked film.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 