Blonde Review: Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe Biopic Prefers Brutality

Andrew Dominik’s Blonde begins in Los Angeles in 1933, with an extended look at a young Norma Jeane Morstensen (Lily Fisher) enduring horrible physical and emotional abuse from her schizophrenic, single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), whose instability ultimately gets her institutionalized and her daughter placed in orphanages. This early trauma, which operates in a magical realist register befitting a wounded child’s perspective and attempt to cope, is positioned as the motivating attribute of the girl who grows up to be Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas), undergirding the iconic star’s private desire for family and love.

Yet this introduction is also a slight outlier in a film that otherwise devotes its nearly three-hour running time to a crushing, plodding series of scenes in which Monroe is exploited by lustful, brutal men. Blonde takes its cues from Monroe’s infamous life, yes, but more specifically Joyce Carol Oates’s 1999 biographical fiction novel of the same name, which made a point of devoting massive amounts of pages to deliberately repetitive scenes of the star being physically and emotionally abused by everyone from lovers to studio executives. Now, in Dominik’s adaptation, Oates’s travelogue of suffering becomes a springboard for aestheticized brutality.

As a stylistic exercise, Blonde is ravishing. In impressionistic fashion, the edges of the frame around Monroe are often blurred as she hallucinates outrunning her stardom and reclaiming the real Norma Jeane lost deep within herself. Tracking shots with cleverly disguised edits mask the way that the woman can turn a corner and abruptly enter a dream world of Freudian nightmares that taunt her with her desires for loving parents and children of her own.

The opening shot of a soundstage’s lights bathing Monroe as she films the iconic moment from The Seven-Year Itch where the star’s skirt blows up as she stands above a subway grate is eerily echoed later by an operating room lamp shining down on her groin as doctors perform an abortion mandated by a studio boss. The glitzy sexualization of the earlier moment becomes the violation of her sexual self-determination. But after a point, these techniques become cheap shorthands, with woozy distortions illustrating Monroe’s worsening pill addiction as she spirals toward doom. By equating her public status as a sex symbol with her private exploitation, the film treats Monroe as just a focal object in the frame for Dominik’s wild aesthetic flourishes.

Less problematic is the way that Chayse Irvin’s cinematography pays tribute to classic Hollywood film techniques. Blonde’s black-and-white scenes often mimic the high-contrast look of film noir, and exteriors subtly use CGI to create the uncanny valley effect of watching old films that use rear-projection backgrounds. Likewise, some of Monroe’s color features and their theatrical trailers are recreated with digital processes that, with their pulsing red and creamy eggshell hues, come startlingly close to capturing look of old Technicolor.

Yet it’s telling that in the carefully calibrated mash-up of modern methods and old-school celluloid looks, Dominik never spares more than a quick glance at the movies that Monroe actually made. Blonde is filled with scenes of Monroe struggling to be taken seriously as an artist, whether studying at the Actors Studio or perceptively comparing some roles to characters by canonical authors like Dostoevsky, all the while enduring the dismissive chuckles of men who assume that she couldn’t possibly have read such high-minded material.

But the film never once takes her actual work seriously, instead viewing it solely as a manifestation of her desire to overcome her childhood abandonment by finding adoration from the public. This does an unforgivable disservice to an actor who did just as much as Marlon Brando to shake up the idea of film acting while also being a bankable screen presence whose box office draw could be compared in modern times to stars like Dwayne Johnson.

Taking a page from Oates’s novel, the male characters are rarely named, though it requires little effort to identify, say, Bobby Cannavale’s retired star athlete as Joe DiMaggio, or Adrien Brody’s nervous playwright as Arthur Miller. The pointed aversion to naming these men aloud matches the way that Blonde flattens them, whether by writing the significant characters all in the same misogynistic voice or using digital effects to literally smear extras’ facial features into garish, animalistic leers or outright blurred anonymity. The thematic thrust of these choices are obvious, but in turning the men into one interchangeable abuser, the film ends up simplifying Monroe as well. It literally infantilizes her in the way she refers to each lover as “daddy” in an obvious expression of a lifelong desire for a father figure. And de Armas’s copious nudity in Blonde’s back half is shot in a way that makes her look simultaneously coquettish and childishly naïve, like a baby who instinctively pulls off its clothes and ambles around the house.

When Cannavale’s DiMaggio stand-in proposes to Monroe, he promises to take her away from her stressful life as a starlet, a statement that the film justifiably treats as condescending. But what’s the meaningful difference between this man’s show of pity and Dominik’s own, with its dismissal of Monroe’s carefully self-managed image and acting ambitions in favor of painting her as nothing more than a bruised plaything? Blonde, then, is the worst kind of feminism, one so absorbed in the desire to “save” a woman that it victimizes her as much as possible to make its redemption of her that much more praiseworthy. In the end, it’s not unfair to equate Dominik to the very men who scoff at Monroe’s mentioning of Chekhov, patting her on the head for her efforts to assert herself before using her for his own gain.