Awards Season Catchup: "Blonde" on Netflix
Wednesday, December 28, 2022 at 9:00PM 
It’s hard to wait to watch a film months after its release and not be at least somewhat affected by what the public thinks about it. To say that the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde has not received favorable mentions is an understatement. Still everyone has opinions so it seemed possible that there might be something worthwhile about it, like Ana de Armas’ Golden Globe-nominated performance or the Oscar-shortlisted makeup and hairstyling. Seeing the NC-17 rating and the daunting 2-hour-and-47-minute runtime at the start of the film sets up certain expectations, and, somehow, this film still manages to surprise, and not in a good way.
Blonde opens in black-and-white on a young Norma Jeane Mortensen (Lily Fisher) and her mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), who shows Norma a photo of a celebrity she claims is her father. Gladys quickly descends into a manic state, driving her young daughter straight towards a fire while everyone else is running the other way...
That chaotic beginning foretells what’s to come over the course of the film’s insufferable runtime, which is a directionless array of wild interactions that make its protagonist seem like she’s being dragged along through her own life with zero control over what’s happening to her.
Biopics always face a difficult challenge. Summing up a person’s life in just a couple hours is an impossible and arduous task. This film, from writer-director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and based on the 2000 novel Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, is described as a “fictionalized chronicle of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe.” Real figures in her life, like her famous husbands Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), and many other well-known celebrities do appear. But the fact that this isn’t actually based on real events makes its lack of coherence all the more baffling. They could have easily chosen just a few events and characters to focus on rather than following Monroe on a dizzying rollercoaster with far too many stops and frequent distracting changes in aspect ratio.
While few have argued that this is a great film, the leading lady is its most feted asset. De Armas is unquestionably a talent, standing out in small roles in films like Blade Runner 2049 and No Time to Die and holding her own opposite a stacked cast in Knives Out. She does have a certain charm here and immerses herself fully into the character, conveying a great deal of emotion and weight through her vivid eyes and smile. She couldn’t feel entirely like the real Monroe since her iconic look was so distinctive, but, with the help of the makeup and hairstyling department, de Armas does approach a sincere imitation. If the movie around her wasn’t such a mess, perhaps her performance could be worthy of celebration. Ultimately her star turn drowns in a star drowns in a film that's too long and unfocused. C-
Blonde is streaming on Netflix.
Reader Comments (6)
Joyce Carol Oates is a brilliant, prolific writer who wrote 58 novels under her own name and a plethora of others under pseudonyms. She has been a frequent contender for the Nobel since the 1980s. Many of her works have been adapted into acclaimed films.
Oates and many critics site Blonde as her finest effort. Originally intended as a novella about a young woman who loses herself to become a movie star, Oates found herself captivated by Monroe. The research revealed Monroe to be an intellectual, a talented actress, a woman of depth. Oates began to see her novel as an exploration of how women are maligned and subjugated by powerful men. Her final transcript was twice as long as the 700 plus published pages.
This film adaptation seeks to be truthful to the novel by creating an expressionistic film that seeks to explore the same themes of the novel. Too often however the film serves to exploit Ana de Armas in much the way Oates reviles. The task of a film adaptation requires taking the literary, the thought provoking and making it visual. The act of film watching much like voyeurism, a look into private worlds. This, intentionally or unintentionally, causes moments of intimacy as well as revulsion.
In the end, this film fails to heed Oates and her comprehension of the separate identities of a woman. For Marilyn Oates labels the first as Norma Jean Baker, the abandoned child yearning for a home, love and stability. The second is Marilyn Monroe, the sex goddess, the media creation who is shamed by a misogynistic society for those attributes that win her adulation. And the third is the Blonde. Oates says, “You don’t have to be born blond. Blondness is attainable, but it can’t guarantee a flawless life. Desired and worshipped as an ideal image of white beauty and class, the Blonde is nonetheless despised and defiled as a whore in pornography and fantasy.”
After reflecting on this problematic film, it may be the simple conclusion that an intellectual exploration of feminine identity is ill suited to cinema.
No female quintet makes any sense without Ana de Armas in it.
I have to disagree about De Armas I think rises above her sub par film,this is passion vote performance and could be a surprise inclusion on nomination morning,I found her more impressive than Williams and Davis..
Even if not totally successful, I find myself fascinated by this jarring film. I like the audacity in not being a standard biopic (almost always boring!) about Marilyn, but an expressionistic horror-movie version of her life that lands somewhere between Fire Walk With Me and Tarkovsky's Stalker in not so much telling us what happened in her life but allowing us to think about the nightmare that might have been living it. Having died so young, Marilyn is in many ways unknowable to us, but we do know her life ended in tragedy. If, as they say, "the past is another country," the sense of isolation and alienation of being a beautiful pawn in a terrible and misogynistic system is also unknowable, but we do know as filmgoing audience members that it's moviemaking that pulled her into this vortex. The film thus implicates the viewer and forces us to endure the nightmare hellscape that, if not the real or full Marilyn, is the tragedy of her life and the dark side of what we're consuming.
Seen that way, I find the film fascinating. Like a Tarkovsky or Lynch film, we're placed in the middle of that fear and confusion, so we understand the experience not logically but emotionally.
Mr. Ripley 79 : agree with you about those passion votes. She'll definitely get them. Whether enough people watch Blonde is another matter. I fear she just misses the nomination in the end. But despite what happens it's a hell of a performance. As I have written before it's Blanchett and de Armas and then everyone else.
I feel this film is totally misunderstood. This isn't supposed to be uplifting or even considered a biopic, but an horror story, a nightmare, a cautionary tale. And on that aspect, is completely brilliant. De Armas should be nominated and the cinematography should take the Oscar...