"Blonde" review — a sick exploitation of the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe

“Marilyn doesn’t exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jeane. I’m still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.”

Marilyn Monroe died on August 4, 1962, at the age of 36. The model-turned-movie star was an icon of an era. Her life in the spotlight was defined by glitz, glamour, and sex appeal. The image of Marilyn Monroe is perhaps one of the most enduring symbols of 20th-century American culture, joining the ranks of Elvis and Mickey Mouse. Her legacy as a person, as a defied figure, has outlived her work as an artist. People have obsessed over the details of Monroe’s life — from her lowly origins, to the abuse she faced in the studio system, to her very public love affairs, and ultimately to her death by probable suicide — ever since her passing. Marilyn Monroe is dead, but she’s never been let to rest.

Blonde, the latest Marilyn Monroe biopic, does nothing to aid this.

Based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, the film works as a semi-biographical, semi-fictionalized retelling of Monroe’s time in Hollywood. It chronicles her early childhood in LA, her career as a pin-up model, her career as an actress, her marriages to baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, and then eventually to her tragic death. The latest film from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) director Andrew Dominik, Blonde had been bouncing around “development hell” since 2010, originally with Naomi Watts set to star. The film went through multiple different iterations and many different studios before finally arriving at Netflix with Knives Out (2019) actress Ana de Armas as the lead. The film aims to be a psychological tell-all of the intimate details of Monroe’s life, but Blonde comes across as feeling as exploitative as the people the film condemns.

Ana de Armas in a recreation of a scene from Niagara (1953) in Blonde. Photo: Netflix.

One of Blonde’s defining features is its very distinctive sense of visual style. It often prefers black-and-white but uses a very limited colour palette in its colour moments. The film is shot primarily in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio, but it also likes to jump between 1:1, 1.85:1, and 2.39:1 frames. Dominik’s very specific visual design tries to trap the audience in the maddening internal world of Monroe’s mind. He also goes to great lengths to recreate some of the most iconic photographs of Monroe ever taken for many of the shots. Yet, these stylizations seem to go against the desire to create something of substance. While the film may want to paint an intimate portrait of Monroe, Dominik shoots de Armas in the same voyeuristic style that photographers once shot Monroe. The changes in aspect ratio come across as random and pointless. There are a few creative and memorable technical moments thrown in, including some very interesting scene transitions, but they never do much to reconcile the technical aspects to any discernible intention.

There is also the strange choice to include multiple scenes devoted to Monroe’s CGI fetuses. It’s very hard to write that naturally into the rest of the review because of just how jarring it is in the movie, but it must be mentioned. Why did we need the CGI fetus scenes?

Blonde gained some notoriety earlier this year after news broke that the film would achieve an NC-17 rating, the first film distributed by Netflix with this rating. The film promised to be raw and edgy and would take risks with what it could depict. An American NC-17 allows for a film to depict a lot of content and Blonde takes advantage of its classification, to the extent that it should never have gone. The film hypersexualizes and exploits Monroe’s tragic life. Instead of presenting her trauma with empathy, Dominik uses it for spectacle. When a film makes as many harsh choices as Blonde does, the question becomes, “Does Blonde justify how harshly it depicts its subject matter?” The answer here is “no.” Instead of a gripping epic or an intimate portrait of a tortured artist, Blonde devolves into what seems to be no more than torture porn. With an interminable runtime of 166 minutes, the film is an excruciating watch.

De Armas and Bobby Cannavale in Blonde. Photo: Netflix.

The problem is that there are glimmers of something more interesting far beneath the surface. A few moments of surrealism are thrown into the mix here and quickly become the most interesting choices made. There is an especially memorable moment when the mouths of the paparazzi become too large for their faces as if they had been run through a Snapchat filter. De Armas is excellent as Monroe, although her performance is buried under some strange scripting choices and all of the aforementioned directorial problems. The supporting cast is solid as well with Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody being the standouts. But all of these elements are overshadowed by the deep sense of disgust one walks away from Blonde with.

Monroe’s life was hardly an easy one. She faced constant abuse and exploitation, suffered from severe mental health problems and addictions, and went through many unhappy relationships. Blonde never pretends that Monroe had it easy. It brings all of that abuse to the forefront and serves as a nearly relentless display of it. And when Monroe isn’t being abused on screen, she’s suffering through a severe depressive episode or is visited by the disembodied presence of her unborn baby. Dominik is well aware that Monroe suffered. The glamour and glitz and beauty that Blonde peddles feel so disingenuous because they are so jarring against the screenplay and subject matter. We get it, Dominik! Marilyn Monroe suffered! Let the woman rest.

Blonde is now streaming on Netflix.

Blonde information
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik
Starring Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Evan Williams, and Julianne Nicholson
Released September 28, 2022
166 minutes