The new Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde on Netflix seems to have been made to create controversy. Model/actress Emily Ratajkowski, though she admitted to not seeing the movie, accused it of fetishizing female pain, and that was the top thing that came up when I Googled the movie. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood is concerned the movie comes across as too pro-life in a time when abortion rights are on the line. The fact it became Netflix’s first NC-17 movie caused a bit of a stir.
Me? I had confidence in lead actress Ana de Armas, but I also had never seen her in anything where she wasn’t speaking in her Cuban accent. That much, at least, I will admit was not a cause for concern because if nothing else, de Armas sounds a lot like Marilyn.
Norma Jeane Mortenson (Lily Fisher as a child, de Armas as an adult) grew up with a mentally ill single mother (Julianne Nicholson), yearning for the father she knows only as a single framed photograph. As an adult, she becomes the successful Marilyn Monroe. But Norma Jeane is how she sees herself. “Marilyn” is just a persona that she adopts professionally. As it is, life is rough for Norma Jeane as she is seen as more of a sex object than a person, and any actual talent or desires she might have are largely ignored as she is just Marilyn, the woman no one really understands and everyone sees as theirs in some way.
That seems to extend to every man in her life, whether its studio presidents who use the casting couch method, lovers who aren’t very loving, a couple husbands who all fall short in different ways, and various dubious doctors giving her drugs and the occasional abortion whether she needs or wants them or not. Norma Jean’s life is falling apart, but as anyone who has ever heard “Candle in the Wind” knows, well, that’s pretty much how her story ends. Will she find that whatever it is she is looking for as symbolized by that absent father figure?
Now, I make a rule to always try and say something positive if possible around here in any review. So, here goes: de Armas is great as Marilyn Monroe. She has the vulnerability and the mannerisms down pat, and she gives a good performance all told. Too bad the rest of the movie is at best a dull slog and at worst an exploitative meditation on exploitation. Between the way the aspect ratio and the amount of color onscreen change at the drop of a metaphorical hat, the movie seems to exist merely to show Norma Jeane wanting paternal affection–down to calling various husbands “daddy”–to the fact that every man in the movie treats her poorly, where the best man in her life appears to be Adrien Brody’s Arthur Miller, mostly because he comes across as more useless than anything else as opposed to actively malicious or leering like all the other men she meets, and with the worst arguably being an unnamed American President.
By the by, the scene with said President is, I am pretty sure, the big reason this movie got an NC-17.
But there’s a fine line between displaying exploitation and being exploitative. I had thought the movie might go the former way early on, but then Norma Jeane entered into a relationship, the framing of which looked almost pornographic, and to me it was clearly the latter. Writer/director Andrew Dominik was aiming to make this a movie about how Norma Jeane was treated like a sex object and managed to make a movie where it’s all spectacle and not much else. Given the weirdness, maybe a director like Julie Taymor (and I don’t count myself a fan of her film work) could have pulled it off given Taymor’s work on Frieda, but here, well, de Armas’s performance aside, there doesn’t seem to be much worth seeing here. When stuff gets weird for no good reason, I end up being more distracted than enthralled, and whatever message is coming out of the movie, well, I couldn’t bring myself to care in this movie that was aimed to comment on something and ended up doing that very thing instead.
Grade: C-
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