There's something undeniably compelling about these lurid pseudo-biopics, which feel like ambivalent meditations on America's relationship with the concept of celebrity.
Both also feature lines of dialogue that no human being could speak with a straight face. Both movies portray their subjects as victims - martyrs, even - of their own fame. In that way, it resembles Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, another fever dream that couldn't pause the nonstop spectacle long enough to let its subject feel like a real person. When Norma Jeane's fetus speaks to her in a voice that could belong to her own younger self, the conversation feels like a concoction of her deeply troubled imagination.īlonde is less about the real Monroe than about the mythos that has grown from her story in the collective imagination. But this is a story with a highly unreliable narrator. Kennedy to an equally disturbing abortion scene that has led Planned Parenthood to condemn the film as anti-choice propaganda. Sensuality is simply the armor that she wears to hide the damage within.Īnd there's so much damage, from a horrifying bedroom scene with John F. In this version of her story, Norma Jeane never stops being that child, mesmerized by the flames that will eventually burn her alive. She deftly plays Monroe as an icon of anxiety, an abuse survivor constantly flinching in expectation of another blow.Įarly on, young Norma Jeane watches in helpless terror as her unhinged mother drives them straight toward a wildfire in the Hollywood Hills.
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The whole movie is a fever dream, fueled by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' synthy score and de Armas' unsettling performance. He uses impressionistic digital effects to put us inside Norma Jeane's increasingly paranoid mind: Her husband's face blurs a cheering crowd of men become distorted ghouls. He switches from spectral black-and-white to glossy color to desaturated color and back he messes with the aspect ratio. Dominik never for a second lets us forget that we're watching a movie. Keeping in mind that there's no dearth of books and documentaries about the star, I watched the movie not as an authoritative depiction but as an artist's (or two artists') fictionalized riff on the life of a celebrity.Īnd what a show-offy riff it is. If Blonde were our only source of information about the historical Monroe, that would be a problem. As Norma Jeane buckles under the weight of her own celebrity, letters from a mystery correspondent who claims to be her father become her lifeline. Marriages to a famous athlete (Bobby Cannavale) and a brainy playwright (Adrien Brody) fail to fill the gap. In a shabby Los Angeles apartment in 1933, an unwed mother (Julianne Nicholson) gives her young daughter (Lily Fisher) a photo and announces, "Norma Jeane, that is your father." This image of a glamorous stranger will become Norma Jeane's lodestar, haunting her throughout her life - as she loses her mother to mental illness, endures neglect, and grows up into a pinup girl, a movie star and finally an icon of confident, carefree sexuality: Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas).īut inside this woman who is desired by men the world over is a frightened child still seeking the daddy she never found. With that firmly in mind, as someone with a high tolerance for drama and trauma, I decided to experience this supposed three-hour abuse marathon for myself. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times expressed relief that Monroe herself didn't have to sit through Blonde, "the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her." Camilla Long of Air Mail called it "a shocking, ugly, traitorous movie - nearly three hours of shrieking abuse."ĭirected by Andrew Dominik, Blonde is not a Monroe biopic - as some might assume - but the adaptation of a 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, whose imagination leans to the gothic. Netflix's new Marilyn Monroe movie has provoked strong reactions. De Armas plays Marilyn Monroe as a walking wound in Dominik's controversial riff on her legend.
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