Content warning: This review contains discussions of sexual assault.
What else can be said about Andrew Dominik and Netflix’s new, as of this writing, number one film Blonde? What hasn’t been said in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times; hundreds of websites writing thousands of words ad nauseam about a movie that actually has nothing to say. A film more than a decade in the making, Blonde will neither satisfy nor disturb, as its self-proclaimed uncompromising portrait of a fictionalized Marilyn Monroe has no bite and all bark, with only faint whimpers and tears for its star. And oh boy, do Dominik’s camera and pen bark at Monroe with all the vivacity of a cartoon wolf.
Blonde begins with a tease of the iconic shot of wind blowing up Marilyn’s dress in The Seven Year Itch, the camera ogling the recreated image before throwing us into the life of Norma Jeane Mortenson (Lily Fisher), aged seven. Norma Jeane experiences a revelation as she is shown a framed picture of a man whom her mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), says is her real father. Simultaneously, we come to realize that this idyllic, Hollywood-handsome father will be the missing piece in her life the film comes back to over and over again. The small Norma Jeane is almost drowned by Gladys, then quickly sent away to an orphanage. Just as quickly, she becomes a model, and in Ana de Armas’ first minutes of screentime as Marilyn, we see her recreate several photos of the actual Monroe. Her arrival to her career is breezed by in favor of recreating pin-up poses, and this is the constant of the film: as Dominik himself said for Sight & Sound, “I’m not interested in reality, I’m interested in the images.”
Despite a controversial runtime of two hours and 47 minutes, and an even more controversial NC-17 rating, Blonde has no interest in weaving connective tissue to justify its narrative existence. It is a series of vignettes loosely tied together with string wrapped around a cardboard Pandora’s box of misery and disgust. Its interests are Freudian, as Marilyn agonizes over the father who abandoned her and keeps coming back to her abusive mother, all the while unable to become one herself, searching for some kind of validation she will never receive. Real-life husbands Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Canavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) are both “daddy” just as much as speculated boyfriends in their bizarrely named “Gemini throuple” Charlie Chaplin, Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams) are “daddy.” The only woman in Monroe’s life exists to abuse, and unfortunately for Nicholson, is quite unconvincing at it in the larger moments.
When the film is melodramatic and trying to be a spectacle, it is often a dull misuse of cinematic techniques, such as its constant switch in aspect ratio and use of black-and-white and color. In its quieter moments, though, there are glimmers of something fascinating and emotionally devastating. Gladys’ comment that she “doesn’t know” Marilyn after the latter shows off her photoshoots cuts much deeper than a ghost of Gladys demanding Marilyn actually cut herself on the set of 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock. De Armas’ best scene in the film, besides her screen test for the aforementioned film, is a quiet discussion with DiMaggio, wherein Marilyn’s passion to be a stage actress shines much brighter than any material she’s been given throughout the film.
In fact, the 1952 film is the only one in Monroe’s catalog given any weight outside of recreating frames, placing one of her few dramas as more worthy of Blonde’s time but an example of Marilyn using her own life to play Nell instead of acting. For a character who dreams of acting, Marilyn is put off by embodying a persona that is not her own. De Armas as Marilyn plays up what Amanda Konkle describes in “Some Kind of Mirror” as a “vulnerability” and “fragility” that distinguished Monroe from other sexpots of the decade, but she never truly plays Marilyn Monroe as her public persona is presented in the film. Her single personality trait is that she is fragile, and while de Armas can convince you of this, a poor script keeps her performance one-note. As for the supporting players? Even the men who dominate Marilyn’s life are in so few scenes that no actor can make a true impact save for Brody, who is at the liberty to emote unlike Cannavale, Samuel, and Williams. From his wide-eyed wonder at Marilyn’s performance to the walls he lets fall down as she opens up to him as a fellow intellectual at dinner, Brody, with less screen time than his male co-stars, makes a much larger impact.
For Marilyn, the smiles are fake, and tears and screams burst from her constantly without providing an inner portrait of the character. After all, there is no image to recreate, no photograph to meticulously replicate. A happy Marilyn, in any sense of the word, is abhorrent to Dominik. As he told Deadline, “Any person that’s killing themselves is not a figure of female empowerment. As much as we want to reinvent Marilyn Monroe as the female du jour, I don’t think that that’s responsible.” The blend of truth and fiction is clear: it is a convenient truth to show that Jane Russell was paid much more than Marilyn for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but it is inconvenient to acknowledge Russell or any of Marilyn’s female co-stars like Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Anne Bancroft. It is inconvenient to show Marilyn create a new contract with 20th Century Fox or form her own production company, but convenient to show DiMaggio as the one to demand Marilyn take serious roles. It is convenient to portray the star image Monroe projected as a vulnerable sexpot who was always surrounded by wolves of men, and inconvenient to interrogate or challenge this image by creating a nuanced character that does more than cry and be abused, and who had millions of fans identifying with her many complexities. After all, it would be “irresponsible” to give a depressed woman agency.
The true irresponsibility is the narrative as a whole. There is nothing wrong with capturing the unique kind of misery experienced by women in the entertainment industry. However, Dominik only makes room for it in his film, and adds, presumably, his own politics to it. What does it say that a woman who opposed anti-communist fearmongering and “fought against segregation on Ella Fitgerald’s behalf,” as Christina Newland notes in Sight & Sound, is the star of a vicious anti-abortion scene in a post-Roe v. Wade United States? Marilyn is pried open as she screams that she “changed her mind” all so that she can star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which Dominik himself describes for Sight & Sound as “romanticized whoredom.” The film cares little for the triumph of one of the best performances in a musical comedy ever captured on film, because it would much rather have Marilyn cry “that isn’t me” as she sits at the premiere or have a fetus verbally plea for mercy from her as it ends up miscarried during her second marriage.
Most of the film’s images, though, feel like they exist purely to elicit a reaction out of a sheepish audience. The mouths of men grow to grotesque sizes as Marilyn arrives at the premiere of Some Like It Hot as she, quite condescendingly, looks directly into the camera to tell us, “I love you all.” Two shots occur inside of Marilyn’s vagina, in black-and-white and color. And, of course, the probable reason for the film’s rating: an uninterrupted oral rape scene in which Marilyn must endure John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), starts with the sensibilities of a soft core pornographic film and ends with those of a Hays Code one, as his climax aligns with the destruction of the Washington Monument in a film on the television. Subtlety is not the film’s strong suit. Worst of all might be the needle drops., Marilyn sings “Ev’ry Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy” after she is raped by a studio executive and “Bye Bye Baby” as she sits in her dressing room after her abortion, in case the film’s constant infantilization of its central character and its psychosexual obsession with her father were too subtle.
Blonde shines most in portraying Marilyn and Miller’s romance. Their relationship feels the closest to understanding any semblance of its central character. Miller condescends in their first meeting, questioning how well-read Marilyn truly is. Soon, though, she reveals her artistic passion for plays, and a comparison to Chekov revolutionizes Miller’s views on his own character, Magda. This scene is one of the few that reaches beyond portraying Marilyn’s star persona and examining her as a character outside of it. You want to see their relationship work out, with their whimsical prancing in their wedding attire and commonality as artists. When Marilyn glimpses the first of many pages Miller would write capturing their own conversations, it is a tragedy that actually works in the film, as it is not loud and boisterous, but a quiet, numbing pain. The balance achieved in this sequence, one of fleeting moments of happiness and the ways in which they crumble down, is desperately needed throughout the rest of the film.
However, the film has some of its most frustrating moments in the midst of this. A huge missed opportunity occurs when it cuts around Marilyn performing as Magda in a Miller-penned play in front of him, instead only showing us the raucous applause of those around her. The film calls to mind 2011’s embarrassing My Week with Marilyn, both films telling you that Marilyn was an ingenious actor while never showing us her performances. And, of course, this more grounded and empathetic sequence is where the talking fetus arrives in lackluster CGI. Though some effects and choices stick out visually, such as those later in the film when Marilyn is in the final throes of her addiction, it makes the low quality of others, like the fetus, even more confusing.
In her autobiography My Story, Monroe says of a performance for soldiers in Korea: “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of as a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts.” It is truly amazing that, over 60 years since this self-reflection, Monroe is still correct. Dominik sees Marilyn Monroe as a body that houses a child; Norma Jeane the Madonna and Marilyn the mistress. His camera captures her posterior before her face as she walks through a crowded restaurant; it captures her bare breasts again and again, including a scene where DiMaggio beats her; it looks down on her as she is forced to perform fellatio, the camera clearly at her rapist’s eye level. Any depth that could be reached from examining her brilliant roles and how Marilyn, as she is characterized within the film, achieved them is pushed aside to tell you how miserable she was, how that “delicious” breeze in the first shot came with dozens of men photographing her and her husband beating her. If Monroe is a mirror for people’s “own lewd thoughts,” then those of Blonde are highly sexual, violent, and victimizing.
If Blonde is all blood from miscarriages and guts spilled from sleeping pills mixed with champagne, what does it say? Why this specific actress and not a fictional one? The film wants to gawk at a cultural icon — nothing more. Cut from the Sight & Sound interview Dominik gave is his insistence that people care very little for Monroe’s work, as she is just a “cultural thing.” He then proceeds to ask what Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is about, either feigning ignorance or being genuinely clueless about a film he took great lengths to recreate. That, more than anything, signals that this film has little concern for anything other than the “cultural thing” of Marilyn Monroe. Her films align with moments in her life, and yet the films themselves mean very little, and her life is fictionalized. What value could possibly lie in a distinct disdain for the subject and a societal critique in which the writer-director himself is a prime perpetrator?
If Blonde’s Marilyn is a victim to every man around her, then the film itself is also an abuser, its camera ready to capture all of the lackluster, melodramatic moments that are disguised as brave truths not for the faint of heart. Nothing in the film is as daring as any interview with the cast and crew will have you believe, with the camera only highlighting what could be provocative instead of disturbing. Many scenes feel born from a desire to trend online without any understanding of how to elicit uncomfortable emotions from an audience viewing a brutal, nuanced character study. Marilyn is a passive, underdeveloped character in a thin narrative only stitched together by how many pictures of Monroe Dominik can recreate. If nothing is shocking and everything is copy, then Blonde has no purpose other than to project its own thoughts about Marilyn Monroe onto her.
