Writer and director Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is an ambitious failure.
It pains me to write that. Dominik’s 2007 masterpiece, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is still the best movie of the 21st century. Blonde is also Dominik’s second time behind the camera in the 15 years since wowing me with that brilliant examination of the pitfalls of celebrity and seeking celebrity disguised as a Western.
Blonde is 166 minutes long and based on a 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates. And it is a novel, not a biography. Like Ron Hansen’s 1983 novel, The Assassination of Jesse James, Oates uses the familiar beats of an American icon’s life to fictionalize that person into a larger story about the American culture.
Jesse James not only accomplishes this in spades, but it also casts a spell so hypnotic that even after 160 minutes, you don’t want to leave.
Unfortunately, Blonde accomplishes none of this.
The movie’s biggest problem is that it’s never believable. This has nothing to do with its hyper-real tone. Plenty of movies successfully juice reality to dramatic effect: Brazil (1985), Natural Born Killers (1994), Blue Velvet (1986), and Mulholland Drive (2001)… So it’s not that. The problem is the character of Marilyn Monroe.
As portrayed by Ana de Armas (who, like Florence Pugh, you are required by law to gush over), Marilyn is dull and one note. Considering she’s central to all but a handful of scenes, her doe-eyed, wounded portrayal is so one-note it moves beyond tedious to outright grating. She’s a walking victim; a 24/7 punching bag, an animated blow-up doll with a “kick me” sign taped to her back.
Over the years, I’ve read more than one Monroe biography and countless adjacent Monroe biographies (Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, Frank Sinatra, John Kennedy, etc.). Nonetheless, I sat down to watch Blonde prepared to accept it on its own terms, wanting to lose myself in Dominik’s vision.
Well, his vision has one gear —victim, victim, victim. This fictional Monroe is exhausting to spend time with, especially during the last 40 minutes.
And it was not easy to watch Dominik — by way of Oates — smear real people who don’t deserve it. The sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson did not engage in three-ways with Marilyn (both did separately date her for a time). Nor did they blackmail her with nude photos or deliver the last straw that drove her to suicide at 36.
Joe DiMaggio’s family, those everyday working people, are shown mocking Marilyn, demeaning her, when the truth is that some of the happiest days of Marilyn’s short life were spent with the Yankee Clipper’s family.
John Kennedy did not rape Monroe.
Darryl Zanuck did not rape Monroe.
These mean-spirited smear jobs might be a little more tolerable were there some larger purpose behind them. Other than “poor Marilyn, a victim of the patriarchy,” there isn’t.
Did men use Marilyn? Sure. But to get what she wanted, she allowed herself to be used. That’s called transactional. Let me tell you; no one used Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis, or Olivia De Havilland. But here’s the thing, Marilyn was herself a world-class user and exploiter.
She was no victim. Yes, she had a rough childhood—so do a lot of people. Yes, Hollywood chewed her up—just like it does everyone. None of that alters the fact Monroe was shrewd, intelligent, and mercenary in her ambitions — and chose to sell out her dignity for fame. The same day Monroe married DiMaggio, she told a friend, “I’m going to marry Arthur Miller.” That tells you exactly who Marilyn Monroe was. By the time she married DiMaggio, she’d gotten everything she wanted out of that relationship—the media attention, etc. So now it was time to move on to the intellectual who would give her respectability. After Miller, she honestly thought she would move into the White House as Kennedy’s First Lady.
Yep, after breaking up Miller’s marriage, she set her sights on booting Jackie.
Blonde delves into none of that. Which wouldn’t be such a glaring flaw were the movie not so tediously committed to its punishingly dull victim message.
Blonde would have you believe Monroe’s entire life was spent searching for her father. No, no, no, no, no… The only thing Monroe sought was fame. Monroe was a hopeless fame junkie to the point she sought to be first lady. And when all the fame and wealth she’d accumulated, when being the number-one star in the world still wasn’t enough, she became a junkie-junkie. And when it became clear John Kennedy had no intention of moving her into the White House, she killed herself.
Another failure of Blonde is that I never felt a thing for Armas’s Marilyn. Even knowing the truth about Marilyn Monroe, like any healthy, heterosexual American, when she’s up on the screen, you can’t help but feel a mix of va-va-voom and a desire to protect her from a cruel world. That vibe is what made her special, what made her a star and then an immortal. Unfortunately, Blonde’s Marilyn is so artificial; other than the sense you’re being manipulated by all the woe-is-me, you don’t feel a thing for her.
None of Marilyn’s charisma, that inner-light, that indefinable quality that made Marilyn Marilyn — even without having starred in one knockout feature — is present. The same is true of Armas, who’s lovely but so repressed playing this wounded and despairing bird who’s only ever wounded and despairing, whatever charisma she has that makes it illegal not to gush over her is extinguished.
Blonde’s pro-life message is notable. Abortion is portrayed as it really is: the murder of a baby, of a human being for convenience purposes. Blonde’s Marilyn deeply regrets her two abortions and is haunted by them. After finishing a musical number to roaring applause, she even asks herself, “Is this what I killed my baby for?”
For that one moment, Blonde made me feel something.
UPDATE: I had forgotten about Dominik’s 2012 film Killing Them Softly.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.