Blonde: Film Review
Blonde, Andrew Dominik‘s movie about Marilyn Monroe, has proved quite controversial and people either love it or hate it. I fall in the latter camp – I was not a fan of this movie at all.
This film is a fictional biography of the Hollywood icon, played by Ana de Armas, and charts her life from beginning to end, starting with her troubled childhood as Norma Jeane and ending with her death aged 36. It also covers her rise to fame, her marriages to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) and her addiction to drugs.
My biggest problem with Blonde (I have a few!) is that it’s not clear this is a work of fiction. I feel most people will tune into this film thinking it’s a biopic and believe everything they see as facts about Monroe’s life when it’s actually based on a fictional novel by Joyce Carol Oates. A piece of fiction that makes it seem like Monroe had the most non-stop horrific life. I know her life wasn’t all sunshine and roses but I believe making up instances of abortion, rape and abuse is morally wrong.
This film seems to have no respect or care for its subject at all. She is treated like an object and comes across as a weak victim who is constantly being degraded and abused and always appears to be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. De Armas spends most of the movie in tears or looking miserable, frightened, fragile and sometimes even infantile. There is one reprieve when Monroe marries Miller but the rest of the 2 hours 46 minute movie is dark, bleak, depressing and heartbreaking to watch. This isn’t a depiction of her highs and lows, it focuses just on the negative and it feels incredibly unfair to Monroe.
You can tell this movie was written and directed by a man. De Armas is topless a lot for no real reason and calls her partners “daddy”, which made my skin crawl. The way the camera observes her body during the recreation of The Seven Year Itch subway grate scene screams male gaze. Plus, there is one scene of her in a sex act that was disgusting and made me feel deeply uncomfortable. It was so unnecessary. Why did we need to see her in that situation? Why did de Armas have her boobs out so much?
Ignoring the cruel depiction of its subject, Blonde is also difficult to watch structurally. It’s unnecessarily long and often feels repetitive. It also doesn’t tell one cohesive story – it’s a series of disjointed snapshots that skip a lot of her life. It’s like a greatest hits rundown of Monroe’s worst (fictional) moments.
Bizarrely, although this film is unconcerned with telling the truth, Dominik went to great lengths to make it visually accurate. Existing photographs of Monroe inform the way de Armas looks in most scenes. He cares about realism on a shallow surface level but not where it truly matters. The cinematography is stunning though and I didn’t really mind it constantly changing aspect ratio and going from black and white to colour – not sure of the point though.
The film’s biggest redeeming factor is de Armas as Monroe. She is sensational and deserves an Oscar nomination for her raw, emotional work here. She is magnetic and radiant and her captivating presence made the film easier to watch. The accent was convincing and she only slipped into her Spanish/Cuban twang a few times.
Blonde is a depressing, distasteful and sexist slog that exploits and cheapens Monroe’s legacy.
On Netflix now