Blonde - Review

Blonde will release in select theaters on Sept. 16, 2022, before streaming on Netflix on Sept. 28.

Andrew Dominik’s first film, Chopper (2000), about Australian criminal Mark Brandon Read, begins with an explicit disclaimer: “This film is a dramatization in which narrative liberties have been taken. It is not a biography.” The same label could apply to Dominik’s Blonde — based on the fictitious 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates — but in that case, you may as well paste it onto everything from the science-fantasy of Star Wars to the experimental films of Stan Brakhage. To view Blonde through a factual lens is to miss its point, and to misunderstand its language, even though it exists adjacent to factual history, stringing together a hallucinatory birth-to-death narrative using, as its foundation, iconic photographs of the great Marilyn Monroe, who died tragically at 36.

It's a striking film, and a difficult one, clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes of rigorous, emotionally punishing material performed by a stunning Ana de Armas (all wrapped in a light NC-17 rating). It’s the kind of raw and unexpectedly non-traditional biopic likely to earn an “F” CinemaScore from casual moviegoers, not unlike Dominik’s previous narrative feature, the pitch-black gangster drama Killing Them Softly (2012). Blonde plays out less like a recounting of the real Marilyn, a.k.a. Norma Jeane Baker, or even a story about the fictitious avatar created by Oates, and more like a dream about the world in which Norma Jeane lived, and the private worlds she inhabited, all captured from the inside out.

The gentle, glamorous tones of composers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score spotlights hitting Marilyn in slow motion before the story jumps back in time, opening during Norma Jeane’s childhood in 1933. She’s played here by an impressively capable young actress, Lily Fisher, whose engenders heart-wrenching sympathy. On her 7th birthday, Norma Jeane’s disturbed single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), sets her down a lifelong quest by spinning a yarn about her supposedly famous and powerful absentee father, an unnamed actor in Tinseltown. This plants the bittersweet seeds of stardom deep within Norma Jeane.

These introductory scenes play out via sudden pans, zooms, and shifts in space. A fire rages and consumes all of Los Angeles as Norma Jeane’s mother carries her from their burning home right onto the studio backlot where they appear to live. It’s a distinctly dreamlike prologue, and all the while, it features jolting, disembodied sounds, like buzzing flies and ringing telephones, mixed a little too loudly, as if they were separate from the image — as if they were noises from the real world, invading your sleeping thoughts, and trying desperately to awaken you from this nightmare that’s sure to end in death, and calls unanswered. 

Stark moments of abandonment and abuse portend an eerily captivating tale in which Norma Jeane herself wrestles with ideas of parenthood and abortion. But the film first chronicles her difficult ascendancy: her transformation into Marilyn, the bleached blonde who endures even more trauma at the hands of studio executives behind closed doors, in a manner so transactional that it barely registers with her until after the fact. Blonde is a symbol for Hollywood, while Marilyn, “the” Blonde, is equally a symbol for its festering underbelly, and the beauty and innocence it consumes. 

But she isn’t robbed of her humanity. Setting these scenes, of the birth of Marilyn Monroe, to her real-life song “Every Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy” (from the 1948 film Ladies of the Chorus) turns the famous track into a Rosetta Stone. Marilyn is desired yet infantilized by the men around her. On the other hand, she is also vulnerable and childlike during her naïve search for her phantom father, who writes to her from the shadows, and whose voiceover consumes the soundscape on occasion, like a specter that defines her from off-screen. And, on an unexpected third hand, the film seems to invent, whole cloth, a proclivity for roleplay in which Norma Jeane refers to the various men in her life across the years as “daddy,” even in casual conversation, as if to place her sexuality front and center, right alongside her infantilization by the public, and right alongside the deep emotional crevasses she can’t ignore. 

When it comes to fictionalized depictions of Norma Jean, it's the most powerful her ghost has ever been.

It’s often discomforting to watch, since these private sexual moments are the rare few when the camera looks down at her, from her partners’ vantage. It begins in a dark hotel room, when she mistakes her boyfriend, Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio, for her father coming to surprise her after a premiere. From that point on, it’s a connection she either can’t untangle or doesn't wish to, since it keeps her moving forward towards some complete version of herself who has a loving parent, but a version that may not truly exist.

In traditional cinematic terms, she’s diminutive in the frame when the camera looks down at her whenever she calls her partner “daddy,” and thus, she’s powerless. But given the construction of these scenes — she holds the cards when it comes to these fantasies; for once, she’s in control of them — she engages the leering camera in beguiling powerplay. She is, at times, naked, the object of the camera’s gaze; in several other scenes she claims she hates to be seen, and hates to be objectified by the public like “a piece of meat.” Dominik’s camera does this very thing to her in these moments, and yet these frames of her, nude and helpless, cannot be divorced from the wider, more vivid dimensions that de Armas puts on display — a multifaceted performance rife with anguish and mischief — or from the very context of the images themselves, in which she isn’t singing “daddy” for other people’s entertainment, but repeating it ritualistically for her own fulfillment.

“Daddy” may be all these other things to her, from a reminder of the infantile, even to a cheap, titillating vulgarity, but here, it’s undoubtedly psychosexual too; above all else, it’s simple. It’s a reclamation of power. It’s Norma Jeane being taken advantage of and reduced, but for once, entirely on her own terms. Yes, those terms are actually the director’s, actually de Armas’, and actually Blonde’s, but when it comes to fictionalized depictions of Norma Jean, it’s the most powerful her ghost has ever been — as if de Armas, at her most captivating, were letting the camera believe it’s in control. 

In Blonde, sex is the also most enrapturing it’s been on a Hollywood screen in some time. Its depiction of rape, meanwhile, is ugly — Norma Jeane is forced into oral and penetrative sex at least once each in the film, though both times, the camera remains transfixed on her expression, as if she were forced to shed the rest of her body, and exist outside it — but when she finds two men (the semi-fictionalized sons of Edward G. Robinson and Charlie Chaplin, played by Evan Williams and Xavier Samuel) who love her unconditionally, and help her love her own body in ways the public’s vicious, commodifying gaze won’t allow, their ecstatic threesome can’t be contained by the fabric of the screen. It stretches and contorts the frame, first capturing Marilyn’s whole body, as she feels liberated for the first time, before all three characters’ physical forms transcend light and space, contorting in dazzling, kaleidoscopic arrays until she reaches orgasm. Only then does the film return to its close up on her expression; only then does it connect her body to her eyes, and to her soul. 

Some scenes are in black and white. Some are in color. The aspect ratio seems to shift at random between widescreen (2.35:1), Academy ratio (1:33:1), and everything in between (sometimes it goes even further, expanding vertically). It’s something of a mystery — initially, it seems like public scenes of Marilyn are memorialized in monochrome, with the Norma Jeane recalled in vivid hues — until you realize there’s no real code to unlocking the film’s choice of shape or color, except for which iconic real-life photographs form the basis of a given scene. There’s the one in pink in her apartment. The one where she’s being stuffed into a tiny dress, and the one in color, where she and her husband Arthur Miller seem happy. And then there’s that one. You know the one. Everyone knows the one.

Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin visit several of the locations and even use the specific film stock used to create Marilyn’s most famous images, which they restage, but transform into opportunities to get to know (their version of) Norma Jeane. They often present reverse shots and different angles of iconic moments, and imbue them with tall tales as they peek behind the curtain. The broad strokes of her real life remain: a troubled childhood, a tumultuous studio career, and an uneasy duality between Marilyn the on-screen persona and Norma Jeane the real woman. But this dichotomy is prevented from being flattened into a series of ciphers by one spectacular decision: the film is as much a dreamlike story, and a performance showcase, as it is a conversation about performance itself.

It's as furious as it is touching, as invasive as it is reverential, and as cruel as it is kind.

De Armas is volatile, digging deep into the void that exists in the thin space between Marilyn and Norma Jeane. She captures the shape of Marilyn; at first, she’s comfortable in her skin, her clothes, and her hair — even Marilyn’s soft but measured tone of voice, though she only slightly disguises her Cuban accent — but as Norma Jeane searches for new ways to express her story and her talents, perhaps even her real identity, de Armas’ blonde hair seems to sit uneasily on her head. Her eyebrows become more visibly bleached. Attention is drawn to the artifice of Marilyn Monroe. Her Cuban accent seems to show more, as if the character were even more of an outsider, fighting to find her place. All the while, Norma Jeane mentions the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the stage plays of Anton Chekhov, hoping to be taken seriously both during auditions, and in conversations with Miller (Adrien Brody), her playwright husband. Dostoevsky and Chekhov aren’t just mere references, but North Stars by which she hopes to guide her performances, mold her understanding of character, and deepen her reading of text (and, as if in tribute to Chekhov traditions, de Armas fully commits to living each moment instinctively, with every fiber of her physical being, in an act of recalling these unreal memories). When we see the icon perform her memorable roles, in films like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, we don’t just see Marilyn, the beauty. We also see the artist Norma Jeane and her intellect. Tragically, we also see the way her approach to performance informs this personal duality too, as if her talents contribute to her being ripped in two. 

Blonde floats from scene to scene both wistfully and viscerally, unearthing a surreal vision of Norma Jeane’s body and spirit from beneath the Marilyn debris. It places her physical form front and center, often uncomfortably close, as if to force us to move beyond our own gaze and become one with her flesh. It’s Dominik’s most formally daring work since The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), only it trades the careful brush strokes of his modern Western for jagged distortion in a film about being watched but never seen, adored but never loved, famous but never known — and about searching desperately for the missing pieces of yourself. It’s mournful, yet celebratory. It’s as furious as it is touching, as invasive as it is reverential, and as cruel as it is kind.