Blonde
Directed by Andrew Dominik
Running time: 2hr45 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Ana de Armas stars in Blonde
Joyce Carol Oates’ hefty 2000 novel Blonde cracked Marilyn Monroe in a way few representations of Hollywood’s most enduringly tragic icon have managed: it took the facts of her life, merged them with the mythos, and turned it all into fiction, not slavishly beholden to specifics but channelling something of her spirit all the same. It’s surprising it took the novel this long to reach the screen, not counting a disposable TV miniseries made shortly after its publication. Then again, Andrew Dominik’s ambitious, extravagant adaptation has had such a circuitous, repeatedly stalled path to release that it’s taken on its own kind of mythic status.
What has emerged from years of feverish speculation and scandalised rumour-mongering is a fascinating and turbulent film — sometimes in ways that feel apposite to its tortured, ill-treated subject. But at least as often this Blonde scrambles for a point of view, alternating meticulously realised feats of Marilyn cosplay with more abstract attempts to find her soul amid the flashbulbs, but never quite managing the consistent character portraiture that Oates’ imposing but ultimately affecting novel did.
Blunt and explicit and often punishing in its onscreen punishment of Monroe’s mental and physical fragility, Dominik’s film betrays no great love for her, but it is enthralled by her iconography. Practically every shot in it is a precisely staged and styled pastiche of some image or other from the Monroe archive, as brilliant cinematographer Chayse Irvin (the man who gave Beyonce’s Lemonade some of its most arresting visuals) seamlessly emulates and shuffles between the lenses of photographers like Milton Greene and Eve Arnold. The net result of this homage-heavy aesthetic conjuring, however, is that we forever seem to view Monroe through a public eye; even at such intimate junctures as a mental breakdown, a miscarriage or a tactfully framed blowjob on a certain Mr. President, we’re playing games of impression and recognition.
That’s partly the film’s thesis: that the erstwhile Norma Jeane Baker was never alone even at her loneliest, that her life was capsized by the constant demands and interference of men, who made even her most personal bodily decisions for her. Blonde is most effective in conveying human absence and presence in her world as equally haunted: empty rooms echo with the aggressively modern, industrial quivers of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s score, while the camera twists and blurs the crowds surrounding her — be it her adoring public or her abusive handlers — into faceless, Munchian spectres.
But it never really locates Monroe’s inner life, any tender, tangible sense of the private person behind the guarded shell, and after a time that feels less like a missed target than a deliberate, somewhat condescending denial. Her feelings and desires are limited to a heavily emphasised, literalised daddy complex; her thwarted desire for a child nags away at the film’s conscience too, accounting for its most luridly fantastical flourishes, as the eternal unrealised foetus inside her acquires a plaintive voice of its own. (Surely, in a 165-minute film, someone must have thought those scenes dispensable.) But what of the Marilyn that wasn’t either a longing daughter or a longing mother? Blonde offers little idea.
That’s no fault of Ana de Armas, whose fearsomely committed inhabitation of Monroe finds space for wounded, soul-sick grace notes in and around her exhaustive assignment of physical and vocal verisimilitude. It often feels a more sympathetic performance than the film around it: perhaps Dominik takes such a hard tone and prying perspective to evoke the unyielding man’s world that Monroe had to wrap herself around until she couldn’t anymore. That tension between examination and exploitation will prompt much impassioned debate — enough, certainly, to make this brash, discomfiting, obsessive provocation a must-see. It left me, a lifelong Monroe fan, feeling more protective of her than ever — wishing, perhaps, that the film was a little more on my side.
BLONDE (2022) Written by Andrew Dominik | Shot by Chayse Irvin | Edited by Adam Robinson
Screened in Competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival