Blonde Review: Ana de Armas Dazzles in an Otherwise Miserable Marilyn Monroe Biopic

The celebrity biopic is never going away. It's just too easy to market. You already like the person, or at least know something about them, so why not buy the ticket for (or sit down and stream) a movie about their life? You are already invested just by being alive. 

Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most famous mid-20th century personality after Elvis Presley (who, coincidentally, had a biopic of his own this year), has appeared as a character in films before — My Week With Marilyn was not bad — but there's never been the soup-to-nuts biopic a figure of this stature deserves.

Guess what. There still hasn't been. Blonde, a big swing from Netflix, Ana de Armas, and the not-very-prolific director Andrew Dominik, is a pretty lousy movie for a number of different reasons. But one thing it does right is leave room for someone to pick up the ball and try to do a Marilyn biopic that makes some kind of sense someday.

4.0

Blonde

at Netflix

Like

• Ana de Armas gives a powerful performance
• Some scenes are effective on their own

Dislike

• Takes liberties with the truth for no clear reason
• Wallows in and exploits Marilyn's misery
• Painfully blunt script

Blonde, based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, has individual moments that crackle, but I just can't shake its attitude toward the basic facts of Marylin Monroe's life. To take the example of this year's Elvis: Director Baz Luhrmann took a lot of obvious liberties and presented a carnivalesque work swirling with flash to get at the essence of Elvis. Andrew Dominik has made a movie that also has experimental, impressionistic sequences, but they are mixed with dramatic scenes with absolutely no connection to truth. And for whatever reason, it just hits different.

Also: Elvis is a celebration, Blonde is torment. Yes, it's about a woman who (at least in Oates/Dominik's version) is consigned to a miserable existence from the moment she is born, but the point of this nasty movie seems to be to ensure the audience suffers along with her. Not every work of art needs to be fun, but at two hours and 45 minutes, you'll eventually ask yourself, "Did I really sign up for this?" and reach for the remote.

The first scenes in Blonde are the most effective, showing a cute little girl crying and screaming as her mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson) commits acts of abuse. It's all very well shot — a dreamy scene during a wildfire set to Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' music is mesmerizing — but it's very difficult to watch. 

That little girl, Norma Jeane, soon blossoms into Ana de Armas as the pin-up model and, eventually, actress Marylin Monroe. We don't really see why (or how) the nervous Norma Jeane begins her career as a performer, other than an expressed desire to "escape." Time and again in the movie she'll say that the Marilyn on the screen "isn't the real me," but Blonde makes no effort to tell us who the real Norma Jeane is. It's entirely possible this is actually the point: that even Norma Jeane doesn't know anymore, and Dominik is intentionally keeping the audience at a frustrating distance. But I'm not too sure. Too much in this movie is embarrassingly blunt in its approach.

For example, we know that Norma Jeane never met her father, but was told by her mother (before she was institutionalized) that one day he would come for her. Later in life, as she has romances with Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), she only calls her lovers (and eventual husbands) "Daddy." In time, she finds herself in the bedroom (and being degraded) by the biggest Daddy in America at the time: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As she manipulates him in a rather NC-17 way, the TV in the president's suite shows rockets, turret guns, and the Washington Monument. I think I saw that in an old Monty Python sketch.

Apart from being abandoned by her father (who wanted her aborted, so her mother tells her), the other big tragedy in Blonde is Norma Jeane's forced abortion. She's unsure if she wants to keep a baby from her brief triad tryst with Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) — which never happened, according to my cursory research — but the studio demands that she get rid of it. At the clinic she changes her mind ("it's my choice!"), but she is strapped down, and we witness the medical procedure from the uterus's point of view. Later, at the Gentleman Prefer Blondes premiere, she mutters, "I killed my baby for this?" Other moments conclude with equally unsubtle lines of dialogue, including some sent telepathically from future fetuses.

The fabrication issues aside, Blonde is still a very weird exercise in misery. Norma Jeane bounces from one breakdown to the next, getting addicted to pills and becoming more depressed. Her only friend, her makeup artist (Toby Huss), provides her with the ultimate fix: the ability to transform into Marilyn, where she can at least hide for a little while.

Unfortunately, none of this is particularly new. Fame's light is a harsh one, got it. Dominik tries to dazzle us with changing aspect ratios and switching from black and white to color now and then, but it's a trick with no purpose. When there's no real story, formalist experimentation feels like desperation.

Ana de Armas, a very talented woman, acts her head off in this, and fares better than most would. She looks remarkable in the many slow-motion shots. She's naked in a lot of this, too; there's no point in hiding that fact, and whether this adds to the integrity of the project is subject to debate. There is one consensual lovemaking scene (among the few moments in this bleak movie where she smiles) that certainly qualifies as "successful eroticism," if I may be so bold. Perhaps it is to de Armas' credit that I spent the final 30 minutes chanting, "Oh, just end already!"? Were she less of a sympathetic performer seeing her suffer would not have been so painful.

Premieres: Wednesday, Sept. 28 on Netflix
Who's in it: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne Nicholson
Who's behind it: Andrew Dominik (screenwriter, director)
For fans of: Ana de Armas, being miserable