Blonde is beautiful crap. Andrew Dominik, the director, can do both. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is critically one of the great films of the 2000s, and Killing Them Softly is a movie that looks great but I think is pretty empty at its center. Well, apparently Dominik found something even prettier and emptier in this controversial book adaptation of Marilyn Monroe’s career. Even though you’ll be enamored with the beautiful imagery on screen, you’ll feel icky the entire time watching this 3 hour Netflix extravaganza.
Dominik in 3 hours gives us his take on the Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) experience. Born Norma Jeane (Lily Fisher), young Marilyn is raised by a single, semi-delusional mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson) who keeps beating into Norma that her father will be “visiting soon.” Norma grows up and becomes the pin-up sexpot Marilyn the world knows, and goes through her very public life of making films and trying to have a family more privately, with people like the Ex-Athlete (Bobby Canavale, doing Joe DiMaggio), the Playwright (Adrien Brody, doing Arthur Miller), and maybe even a certain 35th President of the United States.
Blonde does not need to be 3 hours. What it posits about Marilyn Monroe is pretty simple: she had crippling daddy issues and fear of abandonment that manifested in this persona designed to attract every man to her. Plus, that fear made Marilyn subconsciously resentful of her pre-born kids when she wanted to have a baby and start a family, creating a never ending shame cycle. The book and movie strip a lot of agency away from Monroe herself, and whatever agency she does have is self-destructive, making it seem like Dominik is blaming Monroe for everything that went wrong in her life. Yikes! The simple nature of the shame cycle means the movie becomes repetitive and boring too, as the audience knows what is coming next, just with a different guy. No attempt is made at framing Marilyn’s life in the society she lived in, forcing her into vile choices she had to make to keep existing, instead making the abuse she takes a natural byproduct of a life of bad choices, given to her by her delusional mother. Blonde oversimplifies the complex Marilyn so much it borders on condescending and repulsive, when it’s not being needlessly boring and repetitive.
And then there’s the crazy. I’ll give Andrew Dominik this: at least he swings for the fences, as does Ana de Armas. They’re fully committed into this take on Marilyn Monroe and take it to some truly ridiculous extremes. de Armas assumes Monroe’s onscreen voice is how she talked in public and in private. Monroe adopted the voice to overcome a stutter, which I wish de Armas infused into her performance, but that’s the book Marilyn, so here we are, befuddled why Marilyn is speaking elegantly using a raspy sexy voice for no apparent reason. The John F. Kennedy stuff is pretty wild too, going right for that exploitative sex that keeps people watching the movie hoping for the super hot woman to hookup with the President. But by far the craziest moment happens about halfway though. You’ll know it instantly when it starts happening. My eyes started bugging, and even though I was watching this alone, I think I screamed out “What is happening right now? Are you effing serious?” And then I burst out laughing, and took at least 20-30 minutes to try to seriously watch Blonde. The scene fits into the story Dominik is trying to tell, but man, it is a CHOICE, and I would love for someone who loved it to explain to me why it needed to be in there.
Some Like It Hot is about 30 minutes shorter than Blonde. I’d rather you just watch that gem of a film and then just google Marilyn Monroe for thirty minutes. You’d learn more about Marilyn and her complicated life than Blonde’s infantile chauvinistic take on the woman. Hell I’d rather you read the book instead, which has much more conspiracy laden information that’s more interesting than this movie’s condescending nonsense.