Blonde: Exploitation Odyssey
At one point during the film it looks like flight attendants are going to throw Marilyn outside of a plane and it would’ve been believable and made sense in the story because of how she has been treated by the script for the last 2 hours of the film.
Marilyn Monroe is an American icon both on an off the screen, but for director Andrew Dominik she serves as the symbol of suffering.
Blonde is adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ novel which reinvents certain aspects from Monroe’s life that is heavily watered down in the final screenplay. The movie is best interpreted as a collection of Marilyn’s worst moments from an abusive childhood skipping straight into her stardom. A lot of details are omitted to get right to the graphic abuse. it is not surprising that this movie took so long to find a home for with the route it decides to go for exploring the tribulations of Ms. Monroe. Audiences need to grasp that this is exploring the idea of Marilyn Monroe as they proceed with caution.
At the center of this fictional world is Marilyn Monroe trapped in the peroxide prison of Marilyn Monroe. The film makes clear that these are two separate beings who share one woman’s body as they navigate through a world of misogyny and abuse. She is depicted as an infantile victim whose problems all stem from a missing father in her life leading to a life of neglect and paranoia. It is her kindness that leaves her vulnerable to decades of degradation by those around her.
On top of everything, she has multiple pregnancies which all end poorly for her involving graphic abortions and miscarriages. It is suggesting that all her problems will be solved if she had a child. Her desperate need to have a child plays into her absence of a loving, supportive mother. The imagery of a CGI talking fetus is meant to explore this idea but feels ridiculous.
Ana de Armas is crying a lot. When her tears are dried she is naked and breathily uttering the word daddy. She nails down the idea that in this film Marilyn is supposed to be a fragile victim. De Armas never holds back in her interpretation of Monroe and it is admirable how much she commits for this. It is not an easy role. She is captivating and you desperately crave for her to go deeper but she stays on the surface.
Blonde has some really stunning visuals that display different lights and textures from black and white to technicolor.. None of them ever go together which doesn’t help the fractured screenplay. Sometimes the shaky camera affect doesn’t work and feels like more of a gag to intensify the pain of this one woman. Blurry and spinning affects are used to present her paranoia and further add to the jumbled mess this narrative. It seems like the thoughts behind each choice were just to be experimental and try something cool. As their own they work but together the constant change is a bit distracting and unnecessary. It is one restless fever dream of sight and sound.
Overall, Blonde feels like a very slow journey to death. Each encounter she makes with someone is another take down of her until her ultimate demise, its like they are chipping away at her bit by bit. It feels like scenes are just added in for shock value especially the moments between her and JFK where she is sexually assaulted by the leader of the free world. No room is ever left for her to breathe except when Ana De Armas is doing a breathy impression of the starlet. At no point is she every happy or get to enjoy life. Moments of joy are captured in the re enactments of her most famous performances where a double take is needed because Armas looks scarily like the women she is portraying. Those moments are quickly transformed into something dark. It heavily relies on how endlessly brutalized this woman was and never got a moments of rest.
Blonde attempts to get audiences to feel for Norma Jeane, but the obsession with her pain moves it into a territory of exploitation. There’s no imagination here, everything feels very repetitive. It never gets closer to explaining who this woman was. This was not the way to immortalize an overly exploited icon. It thrives on the pleasure of pain and never decides what it wants to be in style or tone.
Marilyn’s ghost was haunting Ana de Armas for a reason.