Two hours into Blonde, Netflix’s bizarre and ruthless Marilyn Monroe biopic, director Andrew Dominik presents a scene that functions as a visual thesis statement. Arriving at a movie premiere, Monroe encounters a throng of fans whipped into a frenzy by the appearance of their idol. Comprising mostly men, the crowd leers with near-maniacal gusto, straining against policemen who itch for glimpses. Because Dominik deliberately slows down the action, the camera takes in every bared incisor and comically distended jaw. Male gaze? Hardly. Try male maw.
Hardship and exploitation are the twin motifs that run through Dominik’s picture, a secular Passion of the Christ that prizes suffering above all else. Born as Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 Hollywood, Monroe is a mere wisp of a girl when her mother attempts to drown her in a bathtub after a night spent chasing wildfires. She escapes to a kindly neighbor but ends up in the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, where she endures the rest of a troubled childhood. Accompanying much of this early trauma is “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy,” the big-band standard sung by the real-life Monroe in 1948’s Ladies of the Chorus. Alas for our heroine, her father is nothing but a photograph on the wall, a device borrowed from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and used here with so little subtlety that one half expects the beleaguered girl to begin offering it prayers.
Among Blonde’s most obvious missteps is its refusal to dig beneath this surface psychology for traces of the complicated woman beneath. For the orphanage-reared Norma Jeane, every issue is a daddy issue, a hang-up made to explain not only the meekness with which she submits to the casting couch but her lack of protest at being given a sex-kitten alter ego. So uninterested is Dominik in Monroe’s early career that he turns much of it into a minute-long montage of tawdry pinup shoots. Yet this is exactly the portion of the actress’s story that is least known and most interesting. A talented young woman allowed herself to become a plaything for men. To blame “daddy” alone is unobservant and reductive. Worse still, it’s boring — a crippling weakness in light of the movie’s Ten Commandments-esque length.
Given the presence of an easy psychological shorthand, it is no surprise that Monroe’s romantic life is similarly underdeveloped. Joining the LA Actors Circle in 1952, she meets Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) and begins a torrid (and largely fictional) three-way affair. Later beaus include Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with whom Monroe undertakes a pair of ill-advised marriages. Because Blonde’s protagonist is so doggedly one-dimensional a creation, each of her liaisons plays as a SparkNotes summary rather than a layered portrayal of an essential event. Rarely has a 166-minute film had this little to say about its characters’ desires, antipathies, and emotional evolutions.
Though it is tempting to lay the blame for this failure solely at Dominik’s feet, star Ana de Armas is at least as responsible for Blonde’s striking lack of depth. If press reports out of Italy are to be believed, the ingenue received a 14-minute standing ovation following the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere. Yet the performance that inspired such acclamation is a tedious impersonation job in a single register. Never mind that de Armas’s Cuban accent is occasionally audible beneath Monroe’s famous breathiness. The real defect is the odd soullessness that attends straight imitation. (Recall Leonardo DiCaprio’s disastrous attempt to play late-career J. Edgar Hoover.) Having mastered Monroe’s teary pout, de Armas is unable to deliver almost any other emotion. We see the gears spinning, but what comes out is a one-note reproduction rather than a nuanced original.
What the actress does bring to the table, indisputably, is a willingness to demean herself. Following the collapse of her relationship with Miller, Monroe catches the eye of John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) and is soon given the role of on-call mistress to the 35th president. The pair’s primary encounter, which has occasioned much pearl-clutching since the film’s release, is indeed a brutal scene, featuring both reluctant sex and extreme dehumanization. Audiences confronting this moment and others may well question Dominik’s explicit staging, as well as Blonde’s exploitative orientation more generally. As a filmmaking proposition, the idea that viewers need to be told that Monroe’s life was no fairy tale is not just wrongheaded but ridiculous. No one under 60 has seen Some Like It Hot, whereas the cruelty and abuse endured by the actress are known to all. There is no remaining delusion to remedy — no construction to deconstruct.
As for Blonde’s other flaws, they are almost uniformly the result of directorial chutzpah in the first degree. Having received near-universal acclaim for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the Nick Cave documentary One More Time with Feeling, Dominik clearly believes he can do no wrong behind the camera or in the editing suite. How else to explain the film’s random and distracting transitions between color and black and white? Or the Harry Potter vibe achieved when a photograph of Monroe’s father moves its lips and speaks? Or the nightmarish effects employed during the actress’s first menage a trois with Chaplin and Robinson? “I’m not interested in reality; I’m interested in images,” Dominik told the British Film Institute last month. Fine. But choose better images.
Is Blonde, as has been widely remarked, a “pro-life movie”? Yes and no. On the one hand, and startlingly, a fetus speaks to Monroe and asks not to be aborted. On the other, Monroe’s drug-abetted death is handled with such beatific delicacy that the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention should probably release a statement. In the end, audiences looking for a “message” in Blonde are likely to find only one, rendered in glowing letters and 50-point font: It’s not easy being Marilyn. With that assertion, who among us could possibly disagree?
Graham Hillard is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
