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blond
Rating: ****
More than 60 years have now passed since Marilyn Monroe’s death, but the investigation into her life and death shows no signs of abating.
Perhaps only Diana, Princess of Wales, holds a candle in the wind for her as a 20th century icon still subject to rumour, gossip and intrigue. They were both just 36 when they died.
Judging by the fuss surrounding the mighty Netflix photo Blonde, which lasts for the best part of three hours, that enduring fascination might actually intensify.
The film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, a fictionalized account of Monroe’s life, spanning over 700 pages. I read it once on vacation and needed another vacation when I finished it. It was quite difficult.
So in many ways the movie is. Writer-director Andrew Dominik also made The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007), which was admired by some and scratched the heads of others.
He specializes in a brand of quirkiness that goes full throttle in Blonde, but I liked it much more than I expected.
Ana de Armas – reportedly the third choice for the role – is amazing as Marilyn Monroe. While there are times when she looks like a pub tribute act, there are other times when she looks surprisingly like the real thing
Blonde shows that Monroe’s 36 years were defined as much by what she lacked as what she had
Ana de Armas plays Monroe. She was reportedly the third pick after Naomi Watts and Jessica Chastain, and lots of Hollywood brows went wild when she was cast.
She is Cuban after all. She has a Latino accent. No one, except possibly Dominik, watched her make her way through the 2019 film Knives Out, or played a CIA agent in the latest Bond film No Time To Die, and thought of The Seven Year Itch.
Still, she’s great. The Cuban vowels come up here and there, but overall she’s nailed the husky Monroe voice, and while there are times when she sounds like a pub tribute act, there are other times when she’s surprisingly like the real thing. .
In addition, Dominik has portrayed her very convincingly in sequences from Monroe’s most famous films.
The story begins with a miserable childhood in Los Angeles, where young Norma Jeane (Lily Fisher) is abused by a mentally unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson).
Later, she gets her film breakthrough, as so many young actresses did in the so-called heyday of a notoriously licentious industry, by submitting to the sweaty advances of a predatory producer.
Director Andrew Dominik has portrayed Armas very convincingly in sequences from Monroe’s most famous films
Men, it must be said, don’t exactly take credit for this film. Charlie Chaplin’s son Cass (Xavier Samuel), an early lover, plays an unspeakably cruel trick with her.
Baseball hero Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), whom she married in 1954, is so fond of her that he regularly beats her up.
In one particularly shocking scene, President John F Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson, who also played JFK in the 2016 film Jackie), treats her no better than a backstreet prostitute.
Only the great playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), her husband after DiMaggio, behaves decently. But their marriage is doomed to fail after she miscarries their baby (usually from Dominik, he lets the fetus talk to her), and by the time she makes Some Like It Hot (1959), she’s a pill- popping, tantrum-throwing liability.
Despite the studied quirkiness with which much of this is presented—the black-and-white to color transitions, the voiceovers, soft-focus sequences and slo-mo, all of which give the film a dreamy quality—the ironclad, tragic truths of her life are tackled head on.
From childhood she longed for her absent father and could have held a psychoanalysis conference on her own; her name for both DiMaggio and Miller is ‘Daddy’.
Indeed, blonde shows that her 36 years were defined as much by what she lacked (a father, a conscious mother, children, stability) as by what she had (beauty, talent and unimaginable fame).
For those who know her story well, and there should be plenty, if not most of us, there are some curious omissions. As in the book, there is no reference to her contacts with the other Kennedy brother, Robert.
But while the book, as I recall, delivered the theory that she was murdered as a hard fact, here the circumstances of her sad, lonely death are clouded a bit in a deliberately chaotic blur of images.
In many ways, of course, it was also a chaotic haze of a life.