Blonde

dir: Andrew Dominik

2022

Three hours of this. Three hours of mostly misery.

Blonde is the 2 hours and 47 minutes long fictionalised biopic based not on Marilyn Monroe’s actual life but on a book by Joyce Carol Oates. There is some crossover between the two (Marilyn’s actual life and the book), and then there’s the third filter through which Andrew Dominik wedges the story through his screenplay.

I don’t think anyone over the age of 40 or so will confuse this with actual Earth history. To younger people, who from what I hear don’t ever watch movies anyway, this might become the bible on a person they don’t know and don’t remember. But to the rest of us she’s still a well-known figure from the last century, up there with Gandhi, Hitler, Churchill, Michael Jackson and Big Bird from Sesame Street. An icon. Maybe the icon, or at least the blonde icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

To us, just to generalise massively, she was more famous as the icon than she was an actor or a person, as a reference more than for any performance. As an image, through countless famous images, of a certain idea of femininity or sexuality that had nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with her as a product.

This flick tries to say a lot about the person, as opposed to the icon, to explain her deep sadness, to show us all the many reasons for her deep sadness, and to deliver it in a complicated, visually stunning, musically depressing, very long package that emphasises the psychological over the literal historical.

In other words, a highly stylised fictionalisation intended to reveal the “truth”.

Whatever. The film has a moody, melancholy score from usual suspects (for this director) Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and uses black and white stock, and every possible film aspect ratio that Dominik had access to, all for the purposes of replicating a ream of famous photos of her with the intention of fleshing her character out by elaborating on the world she lived in, that existed leading up to and following immediately after those iconic shots.

Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier, the main character in this flick isn’t Marilyn Monroe, it’s actually this lesser known girl called Norma Jeane Mortenson (Ana de Armas).

Surviving an appalling childhood of abuse and neglect in the 1930s, she improbably goes on to stardom through the process of being abused by the right people to kick her cinematic career off. Surviving that childhood is no mean feat. Her mother torments her with stories of her mysterious father who left her mother because of her falling pregnant, therefore it’s Norma Jeane’s fault she doesn’t have a dad. The mother tries to kill her multiple times, first by fire, and then with water.

The mother is unsuccessful in her efforts, thankfully, but is incarcerated for them. The problem is, no-one wants to look after the child, and she ends up in an orphanage.

“But I’m not an orphan!” screams the poor child multiple times, unaware as yet that something can be true and still not be a defence against the cruelty of the world.

Then she’s a model! Then, after being raped by one of the studio heads, she starts getting work.

There is a protracted scene where she is auditioning for the role of a woman with serious mental health issues, and though she does an amazing, convincing job, she is dismissed by a producer for not acting, in his opinion, because she just seems like a crazy person. The scene is deliberately awkward, but works, amazingly well. I thought she’d won the jerk over, only to have him double down on his disdain.

Whenever Norma Jeane mentions an author, or something beyond the sphere of what people assume she would know about, people are at first shocked, and then disbelieving, but she never insists on it, she quietly tries to state her case, and generally is mocked or ignored.

It’s one of the many heartbreaking elements of the narrative, and of her performance, probably the least viciously realised on screen, but it still cuts deep.

You see, the world thinks she is and treats her like she’s a fucking idiot without any autonomy well before her stardom, during, and briefly after. And why? Because this has always been a fundamentally misogynistic world, one that prizes women for qualities it then destroys them for.

Perversely, as her career is starting, the flick depicts this time as probably one of the only happy times of her life, around 1952. She is part of a throuple, I guess is the word we’d use now, with two sons of cinema royalty, one being Chaplin’s offspring (a very louche Xavier Samuel) and the other being Edward G Robison’s, Clancy Wiggum Junior (Evan Williams). With these reprobates she has consensual sex, has wacky and fun times, and first indicates the level of disassociation that she will require for stardom once she differentiates the avatar she plays on screen as opposed to who she is in private. She is Norma with these boys, and Marilyn only on the screen or before the cameras.

Of course the good times can’t last forever, and this relatively happy time ends with a studio-mandated abortion, which she either wants or changes her mind about, it’s hard to really say. The flick seems to want to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to abortion, in that we are shown how desperately at times Norma would have loved to be a mother, to shower her child with the love and affection she was denied, and yet when she seems agree to having it done, it’s depicted as something being done to her against her will (like a lot of things that happen in her life).

I guess it ties in the broader theme and emphasises just how little control she had over her own life.

Next phase, of oh so many phases, indicates both her growing dependence on pills to get by, and how paralyzed she is by the thought of her entirely absent father. Letters start appearing without return addresses saying that He laments that he hasn’t been in her life thus far, but he longs for the day when they could be reunited, and that it will be at some mystical point in the future. He loves her, even though he doesn’t entirely approve of her antics in the public eye, tut-tutting the whole while.

At the same time retired baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale, in full asshole mode) pursues her, believing it would be good for his brand if he could put the most famous sex symbol in America on his arm.

Of course, he hates her for being a sex symbol, and cannot handle his own insecurities, for which she is made to suffer. The meshing of her desire to find (and be approved of) by her father and having some older man to protect her from the world combine briefly in the person of DiMaggio, who she only calls “Daddy” throughout, realising far too late that he isn’t going to protect her from the world: he is the world that she needs protecting from.

As vile as this section of the film is, there are two strong parts in it. Joe brings Norma home to meet the family, and she is baffled both by Italian-American domesticity, and by the manner in which people sit around having conversations.

She expresses (what to me seemed like uncharacteristic) confusion as to how people know what to say when their isn’t a script or a screenplay that they’ve studied. How do they know what to do and say when their lines aren’t written and no one’s directing them?

DiMaggio, perplexed, mansplains that having a conversation is about intentions, and a willingness to dominate, something which represents an alien landscape to Norma. She knows how to play Marilyn with people she doesn’t know, but she doesn’t know how to be Norma with them.

At this time she’s making the film The Seven Year Itch, which has the infamous image of her in a white dress walking over a subway grate as the air blows up her hem. This is filmed and filmed again from every angle, with a multitude of men surrounding her, not only the film cameras capturing every leering angle, but photographers as well; the men becoming a surging, heaving mass of monsters wanting to get to her, wanting to eat her or kill her or worship her. Slow motion, so much of it is shown and shown again, until one of the last faces shown is the furious face of DiMaggio, hating her for what the world wants.

Beatings, violence, rape. It’s not explicitly shown a lot of the time, thankfully, but what a fucking vicious world she lived in. I’m amazed, considering the feel of this film, that she lasted as long as she did.

She still dreams, not of stardom, but of a father, any father figure, who might love her for who she is, as opposed to Marilyn, who as far as Norma can tell doesn’t really exist. She can summon her easily, in the beginning, in a mirror at will, but it becomes harder and harder as time rolls on.

In New York she meets the man who will become her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who, even though he seems like he will be gentle with her, thinks she’s a fucking idiot. When she expresses an opinion on his play Magda, she says that it reminds her of a character from Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. The other characters think Natasha is a fucking idiot and mock her, but by the end of the story she is the one in control.

Miller initially mocks the very idea that Monroe could have even thought those thoughts herself, and derisively asks “did he tell you that?”, meaning Miller assumes Elia Kazan, with whom she was in a relationship briefly before him, must have mansplained it to her. Gods forbid that she be capable of her own thoughts.

But he’s not talking to Marilyn Monroe: He’s talking to Norma, and she has ideas, and thinks about how some of the characters in plays and books she’s read might think or feel about things, and she can articulate her thoughts on these topics.

Miller is blown away. She even, without knowing it, explains something to him from his own past that he never intuited, which she figures out from the play that he wrote about someone from his past, who he'd frozen in amber by not giving her a character arc.

That’s probably my favourite scene in this long arsed flick. If only there was more intelligent chats and less suffering.

But life is suffering, and there is more for her to endure before the finish line.

The last part of the flick I hesitate to say is the shortest, but it’s also the most stylistically complex and the most vicious. Throughout the flick Ana de Armas plays the role like Norma is sweet but lost, and the last section has her so lost she is a frightened child running through connected portals and doorways of her own life, day and night, dream and reality, and abuse and unconsciousness blending into a sickening mélange. The arrival at a film premier slows down time so we can see the massive, monstrous mouths of the men screaming at her distend as if to eat her whole.

When she is being ferried around in order to service the king, being JFK, a flight becomes a screening at a theatre which becomes a walk through the aisle to the bathroom to her childhood home before becoming a theatre again before she returns to her window seat. She is barely aware what’s happening throughout even as her awareness of her surroundings is tenuous.

“We have a special bond” she yells at the secret service pimps carrying her to JFK’s bed so he can abuse her. “It’s not even really about sex.”

Well, maybe that’s not true. It seems to be about what he can do to her, from his perspective.

The very end is of course profoundly sad, as she is alone, rightly paranoid, baffled, addled, but still awaiting a final betrayal that will convince her there is nothing worth living for on this terrible planet, and after watching this film it’s hard to argue otherwise.

Hers is a great performance in service of a dismal story, even if her Cuban accent slips through a few times. It feels a bit like Oscarbait, but honestly, as unpleasant as much of this is to watch, I think she probably deserves it. She won’t win, because she’ll be up against Cate Blanchett for Tár, and that’s such a lock I think they’ve already given it to her even though it's only November, but it’s a lot of a performance. The uncanny moments when you forget it’s Ana de Armas and not Marilyn herself – it’s shocking sometimes.

It is an overdone, over-stylised exercise in excessive cinematic and editing techniques, and very showy-offy, but it’s quite ambitious and stunning in its own ways. It’s expressive, cliché yet expansive, impressionistic, (I honestly think it honours the person behind the icon, scouts honor) and very evocative.

It always helps to have a Nick Cave / Warren Ellis soundtrack. They probably compose and record them in their sleep at this stage.

I don’t accept the argument that because this is a misogynistic world, and that this world preyed upon this poor sweet person (who did a whole bunch of fucked up things), that that makes this a misogynistic movie. I really don’t think so. And the fact that a lot of this is fictionalised is kinda irrelevant, especially since her real biography includes far more abuse and misery than they could ever capture here.

I think it’s an amazing film. I can’t imagine ever being in the mood to watch it again, but it’s a massive achievement for a man who we all thought peaked with his biopics for Chopper and then Jesse James, who happened to be Assassinated by some Coward called Robert Ford.

8 ways in which Blonde is an exercise in misery, but, hell, so is life out of 10

--
“I'll get five thousand dollars and Jane Russell gets a hundred thousand... and I'm playing the blonde in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? That's an insult. I'm going to hang up now. Goodbye”
- “Marilyn, wait…”
“Fuck Marilyn, she’s not here.” – Blonde