Delayed Reaction: Blonde

Premise: Imagine how much Marilyn Monroe’s life must’ve sucked.

I sure was rooting for this movie. I’m one of those people who saw writer/director Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and have chased that high ever since. It’s such a gorgeous looking movie. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, among many others, give such measured and appealing performances. I didn’t care for Dominik’s follow up, Killing Them Softly, in 2012. I’ve had to wait a decade for his next film, Blonde. On paper, Blonde sounded promising too. It was supposed to be long and dreamy. He made that work in Assassination. If he could bring the same beauty of the Wild West to Marilyn Monroe and her iconography, that would be something. And he cast Ana De Armas as Marilyn? What an interesting choice. De Armas rules, and it’s hard to find a star’s career more impacted by COVID than hers. Remember, she had Knives Out in late 2019 as her star turn. No Time To Die was supposed to put her on a bigger stage just a couple months later. Blonde was then expected to be her prestige turn later in 2020. She’s still doing just fine for herself, but there’s a narrative where she left 2020 in that “2012 Jennifer Lawrence, my god she’s everywhere” tier.

 

Or maybe Blonde would’ve been just as grueling to sit through in 2020.

 

Blonde is an exquisitely shot movie. It looks great. Dominik has a lot of nice flourishes throughout the film. De Armas makes a much better Marilyn than I ever imagined. I suppose that shouldn’t be so surprising. Both Marilyn and Ana de Armas as stunning. Perhaps I’m easily fooled by the brunette to blonde thing.

 

This movie is grueling and unpleasant though. Overlong too. It’s told in a dreamlike way. Scenes are sometimes literal and other times interpretive. The throughlines are that Norma Jeane (Marilyn Monroe’s real name) gets abused and has daddy issues. I wish that was just me being glib, but that really is the movie. It starts with Norma Jeane as a child being told her father is a famous actor who will never acknowledge her. Her mother has mental problems. This all leaves a hole in Norma Jeane that she spends her life trying to fill. She calls almost all the men she dates “daddy”. There are some failed and aborted pregnancies that follow her. Between assaults and indignities, she is unfulfilled by acting and turns to drugs which eventually kill her. It’s a bummer of a movie that gives Norma Jeanne no agency either.

 

This isn’t really a biopic. The source material is technically a fiction novel. That said, it’s fiction masquerading as a biopic; similar to Citizen Kane really being about William Randolph Hearst but the official stance was “Any similarities to anyone either alive or dead are purely coincidental”. The problem with this formula in this movie is that it leaves both the real and fictionalized Marilyn Monroe frustratingly unexplored. There’s no figuring out Norma Jeanne in Blonde. It offers a thesis going in and repeatedly confirms it. Look, I’ll even leave room for my aversion to this movie being that I’m just not into watching 3-hour bad-vibes mood pieces. Regardless, I didn’t like this movie.

 

Verdict: Strongly Don’t Recommend