The experience of seeing Ana De Armas starrer Blonde may leave you feeling dirty, but at least it’s not boring. Andrew Dominik’s first narrative film in ten years adapts Joyce Carol Oates’s 700-plus page biographical fiction novel of the same name, and it’s a treat.
As a treatise on celebrity and the s*x symbol, this mythical fable about Marilyn Monroe as an unwanted child desired by millions, passed around by men as she desperately searched for someone to call Daddy on her path to self-destruction, blurs not only reality with the fantasy but also empathy with exploitation. Whatever the case may be, you shouldn’t miss it.
There’s a lot to love about this, but the highlight is undoubtedly Ana de Armas’s raw performance, which does little short of exposing the most dissected woman in the annals of popular culture. However, as the film drags on over the 2-hour mark and farther into the nightmare, it transforms into a lurid horror film that may be really uncomfortable.
Ana De Armas Starrer Blonde Review:
You can’t help but feel that everyone would have benefited from Netflix and Dominik losing their reported battle to trim down the long-gestating production. Excessive violence and questionable brutality make you wonder how many more times and in what new and inventive ways this mistreated lady will be tortured, degraded, and ultimately killed in this piece.
The critics who pounced on an early teaser clip to slam Cuban actress Ana De Armasfor her portrayal of Monroe need to calm down. It’s irrelevant to criticize her accent because her voice acting is excellent. This isn’t an attempt at a faithful replication of a famous Hollywood production, but rather a freewheeling fever dream version of it.
Similarly to how Norma Jeane, a fictional character created by Dominik’s script, draws a circle of light containing an alternate self that follows her everywhere she goes, so too is Ana De Armas building a character. That pattern gets a little worn out as Marilyn questions herself to determine which one is real, but that’s not the fault of the game itself.
At first glance, the impersonation alarm bells might be ringing due to the breathy voice and the distant sensuality in eyes tinged with dread and perplexity.
While de Ana De Armas is in character, you feel invested in the movie even with Marilyn’s reluctance to have oral s*x with JFK and her subsequent awkward internal monologue (Caspar Phillipson). That scene marks the precise time when the movie goes completely off the rails, with the quasi-p*rnographic detail probably responsible for the NC-17 rating.
Dominik has Marilyn, scared but barely conscious after a cross-country flight zonked out on pills and champagne, transported to and removed from the nameless president’s hotel suite like a sack of flesh by secret service operatives.
While on the phone discussing claims of s*xual misbehavior, the President abruptly gestures for her to begin working on his p*nis. Just don’t let me throw up, she begs. It’s possible you can relate to this.
The psychological arc with the absent father is immediately established at the outset. Norma Jeane’s (Julianne Nicholson) unstable mother, on the occasion of the girl’s birthday, takes her to the room where she slept in a drawer as an infant and shows her a framed portrait of her father, claiming that the man’s identity must remain secret for the sake of the family’s fame.
Her mother’s attempts to drown Norma Jeane in the tub are further evidence that she was undesired. When the girl’s mother is taken to the hospital, she is given over to neighbors and subsequently placed in an orphanage.
Her adolescence and early adulthood were chronicled in a series of magazine covers, pinups, and calendar nakedness. It is commonly believed that Monroe’s brief but memorable appearance in All About Eve was her first cinematic role because she consented to rape in the office of Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck in order to get the part (David Warshofsky).
She plays the troubled babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock using her own personal experience with trauma in her screen test, and the director and writers of the film find it hilarious. However, before she leaves, the studio head says, “Sweet Jesus, would you look at the ass on that little kid,” a comment that serves as a reminder of the studio system’s commodity status of women.
Adam Robinson, the film’s editor, uses a collage-like visual approach, flitting between black and white and color and varying aspect ratios, to incorporate scenes from movies like Niagara, The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Some Like It Hot.
Cass (Xavier Samuels) and Eddie (Evan Williams), the jaded progeny of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, are involved in a three-way relationship, one of Oates’ most strange imaginative excursions. Both men make a connection to Marilyn by saying they are the offspring of men who never desired them. This is not meant to be dramatic.
Instead, Dominik frames their s*xual encounter as if it were a Herb Ritts photo shoot, leading to headlines about Marilyn having an abortion staged by the studio just as her career is taking off. A fetus cam, an awful tool used to explore her unfulfilled yearning for a kid in the most obvious way imaginable, is introduced as a result of her suffering.
Later, while watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she is appalled and has an inner monologue with her unborn child: “You slaughtered your kid for this?” It’s not you, whatever is on the screen. The reprimanding maternal voice that keeps popping up from the womb is only slightly less glaring than the script’s oversimplified Freudian personality split. Yeesh.
Frequent flashes of the Hollywood premiere scene, complete with a sea of flashbulbs and admirers with grotesquely twisted mouths shouting for Marilyn’s attention, are backed by an impressive otherworldly score by regular Dominik collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.
These scenes help illustrate how Marilyn’s newfound success has left her feeling disoriented and terrified that she may follow the same erratic path that landed her mother in a mental institution. She is abandoned by her friends and family and terrified of the Hollywood press’s incessant harassment.
While the work of a talented visual storyteller, much of it is fairly conventional hell-of-celebrity observation, rarely far from cliché. (Here, Dom works with DP Chayse Irvin, who shot the critically acclaimed films BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee and Lemonade by Beyoncé.) In fact, the film works best emotionally during its extended takes on purely biographical parts.
Included in this category is Marilyn’s tumultuous marriage to baseball great Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), referred to only as “the former athlete.” DiMaggio is unhappy that Marilyn’s popularity has eclipsed his.
A scene from Seven Year Itch has caused him to lose his temper and become violent: the subway grate scene, in which a mob gathers to watch cameras capture her skirt blowing up in the wind.
Even better is the story of Marilyn’s escape from Hollywood in the mid-1950s, when she seeks solace in New York theatre and meets “The Playwright,” Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody, the best of the supporting cast). As the hallucinogenic, hypers*xualized circus comes to a close, Dominik briefly focuses on the defenseless human being at its center.
During their time away from the spotlight in Connecticut, Miller becomes one of the few men she calls “Daddy” who actually respects her intelligence. A miscarriage, however, sends her over the edge once more.
Marilyn’s instability is fueled by periodic letters she receives, purportedly from her father who remains anonymous but who promises to reveal himself to his daughter soon. By the time she discovers the truth, Marilyn will have been through unimaginable mental anguish, and you may feel the same way if you were in her shoes.
Dominik does not get into the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death, but he does touch on the time when she was under observation because of her liaisons with the Kennedys.
However, the writer-director blurs the borders between truth and paranoia, reality and a distorted dreamscape throughout most of Blonde. The film’s protagonist gradually loses his or her dignity as the jarring sounds of phones turned up too high volumes and the continual cloud of semi-consciousness push the film towards sensationalized psychos*xual trauma p*rn.
Marilyn’s terrible story still hits close to home because we know how she was adored around the world, sucked dry by Hollywood, and then left to her own devices in a modest Brentwood home.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to deny the uneasy suspicion that Dominik is enjoying the sleazy show. Ana De Armas shows genuine empathy for the character’s anguish. This is the least we can do for her.
