In one of the many graphic and unpleasant scenes in Blonde—director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel—Ana de Armas’ Marilyn Monroe vomits into an airplane toilet, the camera looking up at her from inside the bowl, so that she spews onto the lens. In a sense, the movie itself pukes all over Monroe’s career.
Clearly Blonde intends to be something else: a sympathetic portrayal of the challenges Monroe faced and the abuses she suffered, particularly as the 20th-century apotheosis of the artist sacrificed on the altar of Hollywood for others’ pleasure and gain. Yet Blonde so wholly commits to its vision of Monroe as a damaged soul—with the filmmaking acumen of a gripping psychological horror film—that it drowns out any sense of the rare talent she was and the rarified art she helped make. I don’t want to be naive and dismiss what Monroe endured, but through Blonde’s trauma lens, classics like Some Like It Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—which are wonderful very much because of her gifts and in some ways comment as astutely on her offscreen experience as what we get here—are little more than signposts along her journey of horrific pain.
And Blonde is horrific. Dominik’s choice to shoot many scenes in the black-and-white, boxy aspect ratio of the classic Hollywood era means that the camera traps de Armas’ Marilyn in the center of the frame—the walls of the screen closing in on her as she looks tearily, sometimes directly at the audience, in distress. The extended prologue, featuring little Norman Jeane (Lily Fisher) suffering abuse at the hands of her mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson), evokes hell when a fire in the Hollywood Hills sends delicate ashes, then licking flames, toward their dingy apartment. An abortion is detailed from the inside of Marilyn’s body; a presidential visit amounts to an excruciating depiction of oral sex (and is likely the reason for the film’s NC-17 rating). Occasionally, the psychological distress is leavened with a surprising elegance, as when cinematographer Chayse Irvin follows the lead of Marilyn’s bleached hair and infuses the screen with high-contrast lighting. As the glow gradually increases, it suggests that the brightness of “Marilyn” has made stardust of Norma Jeane.
What does de Armas do with Marilyn/Norma Jeane? Certainly she delivers an impeccable, precise impression of the star who shone at the outside world—onscreen and in publicity mode. Yet there are very few scenes here where de Armas isn’t “performing” in this way (the moments where she doesn’t use the breathy Marilyn voice are few and far between). What’s more—and this is connected to the movie’s overall emphasis on suffering—there’s almost no sense of the joy of performance that was unmistakable in Monroe’s onscreen appearances. There’s no vivacity, no wit, which are perhaps the two defining qualities Monroe had as an actor.
There’s a wide gap, in other words, between the shiny brilliance of a film like Some Like It Hot and Blonde’s depiction of that film’s premiere, where de Armas’ Monroe walks a red carpet past screaming, leering men whose open mouths threaten to swallow her whole. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, we probably gloss over what it costs some stars to be stars—the Me Too movement was only the most recent reminder of that—but Blonde feels like an overcorrection, an attempt to negate the gloss by burying it in bile.
(9/16/2022)
