THB #219: Blonde. A Review.
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How can I be deeply admiring this film and also hating it at the same time?
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is so skillfully made and it is so clearly precisely what the filmmaker wanted it to be that the disconnected nature of its storytelling is quite breathtaking.
It’s like being a 20something and getting to make out with the most beautiful person in a room full of beautiful people and finding out that they don’t know how to kiss. You don’t want to stop kissing because this person is sooooooo attractive… but as it’s happening, everything about it is awkward and laughably wrong.
I wouldn’t say that Ana de Armas is revelatory in this role. But she is as good as I would expect any actor to be in a tightly-directed role. People who were complaining about her accent seem like nit-pickers to me. Really, I barely ever heard her slip at all. Silly complaint. And she has the sex appeal. Her eyes show intelligence and pain. She hit every note that was asked of her.
There is lots of excellent and sometimes amusing casting in the film. Looking at the cast list, there are a number of actors whose faces I know well and didn’t recognize in the film. Chris Lemmon - who doesn’t work much anymore - is (I assume) the person playing a fun-house-mirror version of Jack Lemmon playing the stand-up bass in a recreated Some Like It Hot moment.
The actor they hired to play Billy Wilder looked nothing like Billy Wilder to me (Wilder had a much rounder head), but he looked a lot like Elia Kazan, who is relevant to the overall story… contributing to the trippy “is this text or subtext?” feel about the entire film.
I felt a little bad for Julianne Nicholson, who did some very nice work and really had to carry the first 15 minutes of the film on her own, aside from the adorable smiling and crying face of young Lily Fisher, before Julianne’s mama was turned into a cartoon and her naked body used for shock value.
I didn’t see Dominik regular Scoot MacNairy or Billions regular Allan Havey though they are in the credits. It took a bit to recognize Garret Dillahunt and Dan Butler. Caspar Phillipson has become the JFK of choice for a bunch of top-line directors. Toby Huss is usually playing a jerk, but he did a really nice job of not going camp as Marilyn’s make-up intimate.
Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams as the sons of Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson were good… though the screenplay made them oddly blurry in their sexuality.
Adrien Brody actually gives a great performance as Arthur Miller. Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio was also quite good in context… though the writing for the character was thin, at best.
Great Oscar-worthy music. Beautiful cinematography. Tech credits - as the trades used to call them in reviews - deliver at the highest level. They do a great job creating familiar images from Marilyn’s moments in front of cameras.
That’s the good stuff.
But as all that is happening and we are watching what often feels like Andrew Dominik’s fever dream of Marilyn Monroe, there is a simple analysis of Norma Jean/Marilyn that tracks from the start of the picture to the end… her mom was nuts and Norma Jean was nuts. She was abused, misunderstood, loved… but whatever happened to her on her journey, she was nuts by genetics and was never going to be anything but nuts.
As much as Marilyn is objectified, the movie is stunningly lust-free. We see moments in which her sexuality was abused and she wasn’t happy with what happened. But was she molested as a child? Did she ever like sex? Was she a sexual person? Did she just put up with it? Did she disconnect when being used just for sex? Did she mind being objectified as much as any woman ever to live or was that a form of positive reinforcement in her mind?
I don’t really care what the answer of the film is. And honestly, in the context of a stylized drama, I don’t care how accurate the claim is. My problem is that I have no idea from watching this film. It takes no position. And maybe it is not for the filmmaker to say. But he sure assumes a lot that is also not his to say by that standard.
We see men literally going wild, eye bulging, mouths agape to the point of parody. But the men who actually get close to Marilyn are neutered in this portrait. The film takes no position, really, on whether the men in her life lusted for her, whether that lust was for her inner self (Norma Jean) or her sexually seductive and overly brave self (Marilyn).
The two prominent men who use her exclusively as a sexual object and then disappear from the film… no connection… no context. The two prominent men who marry her… what do they really want from her? Miller, for instance, is pretty much laid out as primarily driven by her flattery of him. DiMaggio just wants to fix her, it seems. Neither one seems to have any feelings at all about having sex with “Marilyn Monroe!!!”. Not emotionally believable of men, no matter how famous or smart.
It’s not that the movie is shy. I now know much more about Ana de Armas’ nipples than I ever thought I would. She is naked or topless in the film so often (almost always with white tap-pant-style underwear) that when blue veins across her chest (not her breasts) suddenly turned up for the first time in the final sequence of the film, I was trying really hard to figure out whether is was make-up that meant something or if that is really what Ms. de Armas’ chest looks like and that there was no make-up in the sequence for some reason.
The only sex that Marilyn/Norma Jean she seems to be pleased with is as part of a threesome. But even that is unclear. The 2 men she is involved with are like mirror images of one another and seem to be a gay couple… except when they are engaging their genitals with Marilyn.
I guess one could argue that Dominik is saying that sex is not a central issue in the life of Marilyn Monroe. But I don’t actually believe that is what he was after.
Really, Marilyn/Norma Jean herself is just floating through the movie, never grounded. She is often in a drug-induced haze. But it seems more a device - like gauze in front of a lens - than a position on who she was.
I was willing to ride with any positions the filmmaker decided to take. But I felt, as I was watching, that the film refused to stop and offer any weight to anything. Is she a victim? The film has her acting out in ways that make her partially or fully responsible for pretty much every situation she ends up suffering through. So does the film “blame the victim?” I don’t really know. And the movie doesn’t really try to tell me.
Dominik offers the rationale behind most choices and what seems to be her mental illness. But the message it seems to be sending often - Men suck! And yes, agreed. - is not the message that sticks. At one point, we see her drugged for her own benefit with an absurdly comical needle to the neck, but then we see her choosing drugs and alcohol.
How are we supposed to feel? How does the filmmaker feel?
(Some spoilers, which are only spoilers if you don’t know the Marilyn Monroe history, follow. I don’t really see them as spoilers, as I went in knowing the basics about Monroe… but I don’t want to assume for everyone…)
JFK’s sexual interest is so narrow and so standard that the guard at his wide open door doesn’t even notice as movie goddess Marilyn Monroe does what she does to him (not with him… to him). But is there an exploration of any of it? No.
They say that slipping on a banana peel and hurting yourself is a tragedy and that someone else slipping on a banana peel is comedy. I laughed a lot during Blonde.
Too much. Didn’t want to.
But it was almost like a 1970s/80s sitcom in spirit at times… “There she goes again! Oh, that Marilyn! Yuck Yuck Yuck!!!”
There isn’t a damned thing funny about a miscarriage. But when you show the woman walking on the beach with the oversized tray tripping on some sand and falling directly onto her belly and blood instantly oozes into her dress above her belly button and the seemingly loving husband is too busy handing a beer to his friends to have taken the tray for his wife or to run to her when she falls, and then you replay it a couple times… and contextualize it with 2 forced abortions… it becomes very dark comedy. “Oh, that Marilyn! She just can’t keep a baby! Just wait until you see what horror she bumbles through in a drug haze next week!”
It should be a very dark tragedy. Based on the claimed facts, it was a very dark tragedy. But Dominik, who also has sole screenplay credit, keeps the story moving at a pace and really refuses to stop and add any depth to the conversation. As a result, what should be tearful too often seems trite or silly.
I’m not asking for Dominik to spell everything out. I love the vagueness of Killing Them Softly, for instance, in which one subtext is “who’s really a criminal?” Love to be challenged that way. Love to think about the potential meanings. Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is loaded with contradictions about what women want, how they see themselves, and what the best version of clarity is. But it puts everything on the table. A movie also has to make its case, even if the case is a lack of clarity.
I don’t see it as an achievement that you can walk out of the nearly 3-hour long Blonde (or get up from your couch, as most will see it) without the film having made any kind of coherent argument about what happened to Marilyn Monroe that led to her death at 36 years of age.
From the minute Daryl Zanuck pulls down her white panties without saying a word to her and fucks her over his coffee table like she was an order of sushi from Grubhub, Norma Jean says she wants to get away from Marilyn Monroe. But every time she leaves, she goes back. She pointedly does not get pulled back in. She chooses. There is one line to a husband that she needs to work… it’s who she is. But that is not really demonstrated in the movie.
Was it the men? Was it the drugs? Was it her insanity?
Don’t even get me started on her daddy issue. It is so grossly overweight in this film. “And Adolf Hitler was created because a Jewish kid grabbed his teddy bear and the eye fell out!” Oy. It’s 2022 and there is a movie by a genius filmmaker that argues that a girl who grows up with only one parent can never overcome the fact that her father is not in her life? Even if the one parent is certifiably insane. Oy again.
Her mommy issues are extreme and clear. (Well, clear enough.) But they get shoved aside for the missing daddy time after time.
Getting back to Men/Drugs/Insanity… I’d be okay if the movie made the argument that she was a pinball bouncing from one inescapable failure of self to another. But it doesn’t really do that either.
It occurred to me near the end that the movie had not offered me one piece of factual information that I didn’t walk into the theater knowing. And I am not a big Monroe fan.
There are glimpses of really interesting ideas. Joe DiMaggio’s family. But they are more overtly Italian than Joe… and likely more Catholic and judgmental. Interesting. But that last for about 10 seconds in the movie.
At various points, Dominik starts blurring faces in an interesting way from Marilyn’s POV, at one point messing with the voice of one of her husbands. Fascinating. Cool. But is there any text other than her being drunk or drugged? Not really. As blurry as the images.
The film has moments when we see Norma Jean and Marilyn turn on and off. Those are nice. But very brief. Only one time do we really hear Norma Jean talk without using the Marilyn voice... even in her voice over.
As I’ve stated repeatedly… very, very frustrating film. It is so good… and it is so bad. People who point out elements they like or love are not crazy. But the overall movie is not always served well by these high points.
It’s odd. This film reminds me a bit of the work of Brett Morgen as a documentarian. He now makes works of art that reach beyond classic structures of storytelling. I feel like - although it is a pretty straight line - that Dominik was after that kind of idea here. But somehow, Morgan, in his new film Moonage Daydream, emphasizes the themes strongly enough that even as you are having a trippy journey with Bowie and Morgen, you are never lost. Bowie’s artistry is always there, giving a spine to the movie.
The core problem I have with Blonde is that the central character doesn’t have a spine. If it was a movie about how people projected on her and took advantage of her spinelessness, I’d be in. It’s not that. If it was about her endless search for a spine and how close she came and failed endlessly… well, it is a bit of that… but it’s just not well enough defined to maintain the connection to her, in part because this version of Marilyn/Norma Jean is strong enough and decisive enough that it seems like she can make a choice. But then, she can’t.
The sound and the fury are, somehow, fighting each other and never quite adding up.
But it does make a lovely light.
Until tomorrow…