BLONDES HAVE NO FUN
Can Ana De Armas’s Performance Save ‘Blonde’? Here’s What The Reviews Say
“Blonde” is a movie adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about the life of actress and singer Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane). The novel includes information both true and fictive, and director Andrew Dominik takes things even further in his film — to no one’s delight.
Reviews of the film have been almost universally bad, and go into a great deal of detail about why that is, despite an excellent performance from Ana de Armas and other actors like Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody. Here’s what the critics have to say.
The Movie Is Based On A Novelization Of Monroe’s Life
Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel, “Blonde” introduces Norma Jeane as a 7-year-old girl who survives a traumatic event and is essentially orphaned when her mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson) is hospitalized and all she knows of her absent dad is a single picture. (We’ll get back to him in a minute.) The movie quickly shifts to adult Norma Jeane embarking on an acting career, adopting the Marilyn persona and having to submit sexually to a Tinseltown power player.
Juggling past and present, Dominik intercuts childhood fears with grownup tears as she encounters monstrous studio heads (an early “audition” leads to rape), violent husbands (Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio beats her when pin-up photos fire his jealousy) and loveless lovers (an assignation with JFK will make you gag).
”Blonde” isn’t interested in sharing the facts or getting them right; instead, this is an impressionistic but quite vivid portrait of the elusive real-life person Marilyn Monroe.
Ana De Armas Is Excellent As Marilyn
In certain moments, the actress’ embodiment of Monroe is so believable with regard to look, body language and voice (she absolutely nails the star’s breathiness) that one almost gasps. Concurrently, though, she wields stylization as a means of locating something deeper, darker, and more intrinsic. It’s a strategy that speaks to the synergy between the genuine and the artificial that’s at the core of this endeavor, and is one Monroe herself embraces during a standout audition that’s derided for its honest intensity.
Expressing all these emotions and experiences demands a lot of actor de Armas, who rises to the challenge superbly and makes me inclined to give the movie a pass on the basis of her performance alone. She resembles and moves like Monroe enough that in scenes recreating some of the star’s most famous moments — such as the “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and the subway-grate “flying skirt” PR stunt for “The Seven Year Itch” — it’s hard to tell the icon from the actor.
De Armas movingly, and in the best moments subtly, comes off like an insect pinned in place for men’s evaluation — further, like a human being who doesn’t know but almost certainly fears what it is that these men might find if they look hard enough.
It’s A Tough Viewing Experience
Dominik’s film is a long, tough slog through what, at least as depicted here, has to be one of the most unhappy lives ever lived, start to finish — and it is difficult to watch.
De Armas embodies this fully; when she read for the role producers must have asked her to cry, a lot. It’s a bold, fully committed performance as she descends the depths of despair, and takes the audience right along with her.
De Armas gamely plays the character through a wide gamut of emotions and psychological breakdowns, including one weird scene where she has a conversation with a computer-generated image fetus. Dominik frequently puts the viewer in her dreamy, discombobulating perspective, yet Marilyn's torturous journey — involving so many crying jags — is equally painful to watch.
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.
The Film Makes The Same Mistakes It Criticizes
The thrust here is that Monroe was a fragile, psychologically scarred victim, whose relationship with fame was entirely self-punishing.
In fact, it’s not just the thrust, that’s the entire movie.
And at pushing three hours, you’ll have plenty of time to wonder: wasn’t there more to this smart, brilliantly talented woman than that?
[Metro UK]
In scene after scene, Marilyn sits in a room, and someone enters and is mean to her. These scenes are occasionally broken up by other scenes, in which Marilyn enters a room and the person already in the room is mean to her.
The film’s version of Marilyn seems to see her as much of an object as practically everyone else does. Yet instead of the purely sexual lens most see her through, the film grounds her existence only in relation to her absent father and her grief over multiple lost pregnancies, rather than who she is.
Director Andrew Dominik Makes A Lot Of Bizarre Choices
The plot takes a then-this-happened approach that numbs the viewer, despite Dominik’s attempts to liven up the frame with flashing lights, rapid edits, constant colour/B&W shifts, and bizarre images that include a vaginal POV shot and a talking fetus lamenting an abortion.
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.
TL;DR
She’s a subject worth investigating. This particular investigation, however, may not be worthy of her.
[Observer]
Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb.
Blonde is not the type of film that one feels glad to have endured; instead, it leaves a lingering sense of disgust and sadness at the continued objectification of Marilyn Monroe, even by a movie that purports to criticize it.
