Blonde opens with spherical spotlights and flashbulbs violently illuminating Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas), along with glimpses of the circuitry and mechanisms within them—an ideal metaphor for this blindingly striking and harrowing biography-cum-myth of victimization and performance.
Writer/director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 fictionalization of the iconic actress’ life is a kaleidoscopic movie about dreams and reality, sanity and delusion, the authentic and the phony, the past and the present, and the self and the guises constructed to both mask and convey its true nature. Led by de Armas’ hypnotically soulful evocation of Monroe’s longing and despair, it’s a triumph that strives for truth through florid, glamorous artifice. As such, it’s not only about its subject, but also an expression of her—mind, body, and soul.
The Norma Jeane of Blonde (in theaters now; September 28 on Netflix) is a woman tormented. Her humble childhood is spent with an unhinged and hysterical mother (Julianne Nicholson) who seeks self-destruction in the inferno and begets in her daughter a lifelong yearning for her absentee father, whom she’s told is a dashing Clark Gable-ish actor on the perpetual precipice of returning. Anguished daddy issues, fear of rejection, and the cinema thus chaotically commingle inside the young girl, and that continues once the film abruptly leaps forward to a future in which Norma is a platinum-blonde pin-up. In an acting studio, a teacher states that “the circle of light is yours,” and where she should create a mental character that’s separate from her own identity. Create one she (and the movie studio) does in Marilyn Monroe, a persona of peerless, magnetic sex appeal whom Dominik routinely highlights as a distinct entity from Norma via images of the aspiring actress staring at herself—as if to grasp who she is and what she’s become—in the mirror.
That reflective motif, coupled with round explosions of light, dresser drawers (which her mother used for a makeshift crib), and the ringing of a phone—always portending the promise of her father’s reappearance and/or the terrifying demands of her career—is everywhere in Blonde. Dominik doesn’t sculpt his film from traditional, leaden blocks of biopic clay; rather, he stitches it together from wispy bits and pieces of life, lore, and fanciful reveries. His Marilyn is an artist and individual engaged, at heart, in a game of make-believe for the camera, the public, and herself. Her stage-name alter ego allows her to play a part that grants her distance from her near-ceaseless pain and misery, brought about by casting-couch rapes and multiple abortions (Monroe’s CGI fetus chiding her for perpetrating the same cruel rejection as her own mother), or by the husbands—Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody)—who view her as a “vessel” for their selfish wants and needs, and toss her aside when she can’t, or won’t, fulfill them.
Blonde is a vortex of surrogate fathers, impersonations and projections, all of them blending and doubling back on themselves in borderline-hallucinatory fashion. Collaborating with cinematographer Chayse Irvin, Dominik flip-flops between black-and-white and color, as well as employs varying film speeds, degrees of focus and aspect ratios, with balletic fluidity. Complemented by Nick Cave and Walter Ellis’ swooning score, his aesthetics are attuned to Monroe’s poignantly bifurcated condition, not to mention amplify the material’s down-the-rabbit-hole energy. Moreover, he crafts an array of compositions—some baroque recreations of moments from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like it Hot, others offhand snapshots—that capture Monroe’s grand beauty and, also, the constant, rapacious presence of the male gaze (whether filtered through a camera or not) that simultaneously places her on a pedestal and threatens to devour her.
Blonde is a film about performance and the many ways in which it conceals and reveals. To that end, de Armas’ turn is nothing short of a tour de force. In certain moments, the actress’ embodiment of Monroe is so believable with regard to look, body language and voice (she absolutely nails the star’s breathiness) that one almost gasps. Concurrently, though, she wields stylization as a means of locating something deeper, darker, and more intrinsic. It’s a strategy that speaks to the synergy between the genuine and the artificial that’s at the core of this endeavor, and is one Monroe herself embraces during a standout audition that’s derided for its honest intensity. Balancing Monroe’s incessantly weepy distress with sincere vulnerability and marquee radiance, as well as deftly navigating her intellectual and emotional ups and downs, de Armas is a multifaceted, three-dimensional wonder.
There’s scandalous suffering throughout Blonde, including a late sexual assault at the hands of President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson)—the last of Monroe’s would-be “daddy” figures—which solidifies the proceedings as a rapturous torture chamber of misogynistic exploitation and abuse. The horror of being sculpted into, and therefore reduced to, merely a sexual plaything courses through the film’s veins, and is epitomized by a late slow-motion red-carpet panorama (from Monroe’s POV) of screaming male admirers’ faces, their mouths warping into monstrous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-style maws. Dominik imagines the agony and the ecstasy of it all in uniformly gorgeous fashion, thereby further casting the various facets of Monroe’s life and career as ingredients of a bewitchingly illusory and poisonous stew.
Love and sadism, togetherness and alienation, compassion and brutality, Norma and Marilyn, Marilyn and de Armas—there are no boundaries in Dominik’s film, just a woozy cine-swirl of intertwined compulsions, affectations, and tears. Blonde’s grandeur stems from its marriage of the entrancing and the appalling, as well as its understanding that the two were, for Monroe, lifelong bedfellows. The director traces paths between his protagonist’s personal and professional experiences, her then and her now (at least, until her overdose death in 1962), with a silkiness that charms and wounds. More potent still, he does so while also intriguingly implicating viewers in Monroe’s fate. From recurring shots of gala premiere audiences staring in delight at a theatrical screen (sometimes surrounding a sad Monroe), to a late vision of Monroe puking on Dominik’s toilet-ensconced camera, Blonde doesn’t let the movies—or us—off the hook for elevating and tearing down the 20th century’s preeminent object of desire.
