Blonde (Netflix, 2022)
Blonde is not an easy watch, but it offers an intriguing take on one of America’s most celebrated cultural icons: Marilyn Monroe.
It’s important to remember that Blonde is meant as a work of fiction first, and a biographical picture a distant second.
It’s an interpretation, not a Docu-drama, even though it may seem so at times, because Marilyn (real name: Norma Jean Mortenson) did star in famous movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot.
She also had a couple of abortions, was married to baseball player Joe DiMaggio and to playwright Arthur Miller. And she ultimately died an a untimely death, which cemented her status as an American Legend.
But did she lead a happy life? She probably didn’t. And this is where Blonde comes in.
The movie, written and directed by Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James), is based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, who already took great liberties with the source material, and I’m sure Dominik added some more of his own.
Blonde is basically Norma Jeane’s inner turmoil brought to life, seen through contemporary eyes, a kind of ‘everything is trauma’ for the #metoo age. That’s not a criticism, cause to be sure Marilyn was used and abused by a lot of people in Hollywood, who quite literally wanted a piece of ‘that ass’.
However, the false earlier image of the ambitious blonde, who used men to get what she wanted, has now been replaced completely by another one, of the hapless victim with no agency and hardly any control of her life.
Then again, this is Dominik’s vision, and he uses a vast array of cinematic techniques to make his point, varying between color and black and white, using flashbacks and flash forwards, and using a POV shot from inside a vagina being the easiest examples to spot.
Ana de Armas is very convincing as Monroe, and all of the other actors deliver good work too, most of all a brooding Adrien Brody (most recently seen in See How They Run) as second husband Arthur Miller.
I especially liked the scenes Norma Jeane has with Charles Chaplin, Jr (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy Robinson, Jr (Evan Williams), two sons of famous fathers who were just as abandoned as Norma Jeane, who grew up without a father. At least the three of them had some fun together, even though the relationship couldn’t last and Monroe went back to the older men who acted as the father figures in her complicated life.
Blonde is not the definitive take on Norma Jean or Marilyn Monroe, but it is a worthwhile one. It runs for almost three hours, it could have been a half hour shorter, or maybe an hour longer. It is uneven, but it mostly delivers, somewhere between good to great.