At the top of the copyright page of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde is the following statement: “Blonde should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a biography of Marilyn Monroe.” It’s hard to imagine Oates actually believed anyone would pay attention to that line. Certainly Andrew Dominik’s adaptation doesn’t, judging by his maddeningly reductive yet equally overblown movie that very much wants us to believe this is Marilyn. What’s so infuriating about his Blonde is that he seems to actually think he’s offering unvarnished insight into Norma Jeane’s soul when instead he’s simply changed the icon into a different kind of icon, just as standardized and one-dimensional as a much-replicated Byzantine painting. This is the Marilyn whose Daddy issues are so all-consuming there’s really nothing else driving her: she is her neuroses, and we as an audience get to gaze at her fragility as well as her semi-naked body, rather too-often. Ana de Armas’ much-discussed casting turns out to be the film’s only success story and hers is a career-making performance, but the vehicle is unworthy.
What’s especially frustrating is that Dominik’s terrific The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford sought to demythologize one of the American West’s most famed figures, and yet with Blonde he does the opposite, treating his subject from one angle only: unstable victim. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, given this is the go-to mode for all picked-over bios of troubled female celebrities who died young – it’s always Marilyn and Diana of Wales, never James Dean or River Phoenix. Is it the tabloids that have trained the public to want their women beauties messed up, or the other way around? In Pete Seeger’s song “Who Killed Norma Jean?” he sings “Who’ll dig her grave? / The tourist will come and join in the fun / He’ll dig her grave,” and Marilyn’s grave keeps getting dug up over and over until the earth has become leached of nutrient.
One of the many exasperating elements of Blonde is how Dominik drops or completely marginalizes so many people in Marilyn’s life that her isolation becomes perverse: where are the friends, co-stars, gurus, handlers, servants? Sure those who knew her professionally say she was difficult to know (which allows everyone to keep saddling her with their own ideas and fantasies), but the film allows her no genuine communion, no unburdened joy. It also robs her of her screen talent: the few recreations of shoots fail to capture an iota of what she projected on screen, so not only does Blonde treat her solely as victim, it negates her legacy.
Novel and film open in 1933, though here the grandmother is nonexistent and little Norma Jeane (Lily Fisher) is shown a photo of her father for the first time by her disturbed mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), whose speech is peculiarly formal while speaking to a child. When a fire consumes the Hollywood Hills, Gladys scoops up her daughter and drives straight into the conflagration, leading to a lifetime of inferno nightmares. Then in a scene worthy of Mommie Dearest, Gladys partly scalds and drowns her kid, raging that it’s her fault Norma Jeane’s father went away.
A quick jump forward and we get a montage of Marilyn magazine covers, a glimpse of acting class, and then the song “Every baby needs a Daddy” while Darryl Zanuck (David Warshofsky), coyly named “Mr. Z” by both Oates and Dominik, pushes her over his desk and unzips his trousers. She’s shaken – this was hardly Monroe’s first experience of sexual abuse, though the film makes it seem that way – but she’s next on screen with George Sanders in All About Eve and her career starts to roll, despite an agitated intensity that makes colleagues uneasy. Wicked Charlie Chaplin, Jr., aka Cass (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams) get her into a threesome, with Cass instructing her to display her body and reap its energy, but the two guys look like they stepped out of a Ralph Lauren ad rather than a 1950s time warp, and their Svengali hold is laughable. Lest anyone miss the irony that the woman desperate for a daddy is being screwed by two men whose claim to fame is their starry fathers, the script spells it all out for us.
By this time Dominik’s made clear that Norma Jeane dissociates from Marilyn, dividing herself in two (like most film stars). What she really really wants is to be a mother, so when she gets pregnant by one of the bad boys, she’s over the moon. A starry sky cuts to swimming sperm cuts to a tiny fetus (no joke), but of course the studio can’t have an unwed mother as an asset so she’s forced into an abortion. Just after this she meets Joe DiMaggio, or rather, “The Ex-Athlete” (Bobby Cannavale), which prompts the film’s best scene, when Norma Jeane reveals her passion for serious theatre only to realize he’s not interested in an intellectual so she seamlessly shifts the conversation to how much she wants to settle down and have kids.
The ensuing scenes – the film is 2 hours 45 minutes – see Marilyn objectified and Norma Jeane increasingly fragmented. In New York she meets Arthur Miller, or rather, “The Playwright” (Adrien Brody), who’s amazed this bombshell can also talk Chekhov, but that marriage also falls apart with Dominik barely entering into the problems of that famous coupling. Even worse – spectacularly worse – is a sequence with a doped-up Monroe servicing JFK, aka “The President” (Caspar Phillipson), whose climax cuts to b&w movies of spaceships hitting the Capitol Building. Yes, it’s that bad.
The only thing that holds this mess together is Ana de Armas, who channels the familiar child-woman vibe and does her best to inhabit a character whose disturbed mental state is the sum total of her being. She gets the breathy whisper, the widened eyes, the occasional pout, and there are times when the superficial similarity is truly uncanny (though she’s significantly slimmer than Monroe). Yet like all attempts at recreating this troubled woman, Blonde is too caught up in its creator’s notion of Norma Jeane, forgetting there was also a person underneath who sometimes functioned and who gave us indelible performances that touched something beyond carnality.
Dominik is meticulous with his exacting yet cold recreations – the desire for verisimilitude puts the lie to the notion that he or anyone else sees this as a complete work of invention, that this Norma Jeane and the real Norma Jeane aren’t meant to be the same person. Color and b&w are mixed up, not apparently according to any emotional state but dependent on pre-existing images that Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin wanted to copy to the smallest detail. Like the novel, it’s edited in piecemeal fashion, withholding any stabilizing temporality or even development, and the on-set sequences only show her breakdowns, never her talent. For this critic, one of the most devastating scenes in all cinema is in The Misfits, when Monroe, seen in long shot, runs into the open desert and screams. She’s isolated and coming to pieces and we invest those shrieks with everything we know about the actress at that time. We yearn to protect her, to soothe a wounded spirit that cannot find succor; such is her affect, and yet Monroe continues to be prodded and ogled, analyzed through the minds of people who never knew her. No wonder she’s still screaming.
Director: Andrew Dominik
Screenplay: Andrew Dominik, based on the novel Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Cast: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne
Nicholson, Lily Fisher, Evan Williams, Toby Huss, David Warshofsky, Caspar
Phillipson, Dan Butler, Sara Paxton, Rebecca Wisocky, Mike Ostroski, Ravil Isyanov
Producers: Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Tracey Landon,
Scott Robertson
Executive producer: Christina Oh
Cinematography: Chayse Irvin
Production designer: Florencia Martin
Costume designer: Jennifer Johnson
Editing: Adam Robinson
Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
Sound: Lisa Pinero
Production companies: Plan B Entertainment (USA)
World sales: Netflix
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition)
In English
165 minutes
