In Blonde, Ana de Armas explores Marilyn Monroe’s tragic roots
Despite a transformative performance by de Armas, director Andrew Dominik can't decide whether he wants to indict or indulge us for our curiosity about Monroe
Film Reviews Ana de Armas
Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ Pulitzer Prize finalist novel of the same name, Blonde uses a work of biographical fiction to presumably seek deeper truths about the life of Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately, director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination Of Jesse James) mistakes depicting the cruel and relentless ways that the world mistreated Monroe for humanizing her—and while that CVS receipt length list of atrocities certainly tells a version of her story, at 166 minutes the film also subjects viewers to a slog that’s more likely to make them tune out. That said, Ana de Armas (Knives Out) delivers a truly extraordinary performance as the platinum superstar and icon, while Dominik and his collaborators discover endlessly inventive ways to recreate highlights from Monroe’s iconography.
Played by de Armas as an adult and Lily Fisher as a child, Norma Jeane Mortenson grows up a ward of the state after her mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson) is institutionalized for mental health issues. Believing her absent father is a power player in Hollywood, Norma Jeane pursues a career as a model and actor, and lands small roles with the dubious help of Darryl F. Zanuck (David Warshofsky), who essentially pimps her out to other studio decision-makers. Despite studying her craft with absolute sincerity, the opportunities Norma Jeane receives largely trade upon her alter ego’s bombshell sexuality, and she takes solace from the attention by falling into a comforting three-way relationship with fellow performers and low-level celebrities Charles “Cass” Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward “Eddy” G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams).
Two husbands, retired baseball player Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), come and go, as do two pregnancies. But as she experiences more success with films like The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, an infrastructure of doctors and makeup artists assembles (or gets assembled) around her to ensure she looks like Monroe, and when she needs painkillers, feels like her too. Now a bigger star than ever, she receives more opportunities and attention than ever before, leading to a liaison with President John Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), who perhaps unsurprisingly fails to treat her any more tenderly than her previous lovers. But years of physical mistreatment and the coping mechanism of substance abuse take their toll, sending her down a dark path of addiction, loneliness, and ruin.
To say that Ana de Armas is everything in this film is not hyperbole: without her soulful, controlled performance, Dominik’s conception of Monroe could easily slide into disastrous histrionics. Oates’ book revisits but intentionally does not purport to accurately depict who Monroe was and what she went through. But this adaptation—the second, after a TV version made right after the novel’s 2000 publication—seems likely to become definitive, precisely because of the way that de Armas manages to create a real and believable Norma Jeane, whose adult life became a wrestling match between the way the world identified her and the way she saw herself.
It’s not uncommon for women to feel obligated to put a better public face on their behavior than they do in private, but for Norma Jeane, Monroe was that face—tender, unimposing, cheerfully accepting of the indignities to which she is subjected. That her blonde alter ego becomes so beloved, so obsessed over by the media, that she feels no one sees anything of the real person behind it becomes a painfully relatable struggle. And despite Dominik’s endless catalogue of suffering, which includes sexual assault, near-constant control and abuse from her romantic partners, and two abortions from the point of view of her fetus, de Armas injects depth and dimension into the few scenes where the audience gets to see Norma Jeane as a person with complex thoughts and feelings unrestrained by the world’s perception of her as a plaything and object.
In one early scene, she pours her heart into an audition for the film Don’t Bother To Knock, only for the auditioning filmmakers to virtually ignore the pain from her own life that she clearly projects through the role of an unwell babysitter. In another, she makes a suggestion about one of Arthur Miller’s plays that brings Miller (and us) to tears as it highlights her perceptiveness as an artistic collaborator, for once not being seen only for her beauty. Whether or not the rest of the film resonates, with Norma Jeane, de Armas establishes her place among the most promising actresses of her generation, so good that the occasional creeping accent of her Cuban heritage becomes immaterial to the authenticity of her emotions.
It also helps tremendously that Dominik, working with cinematographer Chayse Irvin (BlackKklansman, Beyonce’s Lemonade special), recreates moments so specifically and accurately from the actress’ catalog of films and images that it’s easy to forget de Armas isn’t actually Monroe. During the shooting of Some Like It Hot, for example, the filmmaker splices his star into a scene opposite Tony Curtis, and then cuts to a wider angle, lit exactly the same way, to make it feel like Monroe is stepping right out of Billy Wilder’s film.
Costume design by Jennifer Johnson (I, Tonya) and a phalanx of makeup artists further transform de Armas for shots where it’s almost impossible to distinguish from the originals, which have become the boilerplate of our collective memories of Monroe. Meanwhile, a score by longtime Dominik collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis finds a mesmerizing middle ground between the dreamlike, futuristic work of Vangelis and the haunting, skeletal nightmares of Angelo Badalamenti, holding together the disparate parts of this odyssey, expose, and character study rolled uneasily into one.
Ultimately, Dominik assembles a film in which there’s much to admire, but not quite enough that works to bring Marilyn Monroe, much less lost, little Norma Jeane, fully into focus. Like, say, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Dominik clearly hoped to show the world what his tragic heroine endured before her demise—the person who suffered before her polished visage became immortal. Instead, he reenacts what Monroe went through, blames us for subjecting her to it, and then leaves us without a clear picture of what we should have been better paying attention to, much less an overall sense of who she was.
What Ana de Armas does in Blonde is nothing short of transformative, but unfortunately, the film will likely do little to change the way people see Marilyn Monroe—once again, a victim of people doing what they think is best for her, perhaps with consent but certainly not enough consideration.
76 Comments
It’s a shame David Lynch and Mark Frost never got to do their GODDESS script, but it’s probably for the best. Would’ve been just as exploitative… with some extra Kennedy conspiracy theory touches!
Now it will have to join Ronnie Rocket in the development graveyard.
At least most of the really good ideas of that filtered down to his other projects. I remember going a bit “!” while flipping through it and seeing the Sycamore Trees lyrics.
HA: “roots”!
I know my Queer sensibilities are going to love this. Monroe has a vulnerability that has never quite been captured by another actress in quite the same way. As much as someone hopes a film on her cracks the code, I don’t know if she’ll ever be fully knowable, and that’s why she’s endured. Especially within diva worship within the Queer community, there’s an element of performance to her story that continues to transcend. Separating her as either Norma and Monroe always felt like such binary approach to me, she was both. She wasn’t bombshell or intellect, she was both.
I think Norma Jeane was subsumed by her Monroe persona so early on that it’s hard to say if even she knew what she really wanted or expected professionally (or even personally, since the two were entwined). It’s always seemed to me that she never had the opportunity to fully develop a sense of herself, succumbing to addition and then dying before getting just as she might have been in position to gain control of her own career. So a movie that claimed to know what she was like behind the makeup and peroxide would be highly speculative, at best.
Elton John wrote that song for a reason and it’s tough to beat in terms of an entirely accurate read on her and a beautiful tribute.
Marilyn Monroe got into fights on the weekends?
shh.. hold me closer, Tony Danza.
I read in a magazine that she had electric boots and a mohair suit.
Baby’s got blue eyes…and a howling accent.
Pulitzer Prize finalist= Pulitzer Prize Loser.
If you’re not first you’re last, Kinja Caffeine Spider-Bobby!!!
That doesn’t even make sense!
That accent is REALLY distracting. She certainly looks the part, but good lord. Was her dialect coach Desi Arnaz?
Si!!!
Is the accent a creative choice or was she just not able to do a convincing Monroe accent?I know the actress has a strong accent herself, but so do actors like Tom Hardy and Thandiwe Newton and they do very convincing American accents. I don’t think it will really matter to me as long as the performance is good, but it seems like something people will latch onto.
I think it’s just much harder to get an accent right if it’s in a language you’re not so familiar with. Hardy and Newton are both English and have been speaking English, hearing and understanding American accents their whole lives, whereas Ana de Armas didn’t speak any English until well into adulthood.It’s not a creative choice, and maybe it’s less noticeable in the film than in the trailer, but I agree it doesn’t really matter and it seems like her performance is the one aspect of the film all the critics are gushing over.
That makes a lot of sense.Im a big Marilyn fan and doing a good Marilyn is more about capturing her vulnerabilities more than it is imitating her look and voice.Michelle Williams didn’t sound anything like Marilyn and she was great.
I scratched my head over her casting when it was first announced, but she’s such a good actress that I expect to not notice it after about 10 minutes.
I’m aware that she’s an excellent actress, but I also get distracted with the accent in the trailer.
Still, I hope it’s one of those things where I don’t even notice it after a few minutes into the movie. I think she’s good enough to make me/us forget about it.
She’s more beautiful than Marilyn. Certainly a better actress. And I love me some Marilyn.
Can’t wait for this one. I absolutely loved Jesse James, hopefully this will be another masterpiece of mythmaking (that Twitter will get super angry about, which is all the better).
That film did such an admirable job showing different perspectives and demything a historical legend. I’ll definitely watch this but I’m not expecting a hat trick.
“And despite Dominik’s endless catalogue of suffering, which includes sexual assault, near-constant control and abuse from her romantic partners, and two abortions from the point of view of her fetus…”Wait. What!? Does it have a squeaky voice and scream in pain?
“Why? Why must I feel pain at only 8 weeks?!? Won’t some courageous right-wing legislators save me!?”
Clarence Thomas wants you to be born. So he can harass you in 15 years.
And then dated by Leonardo Dicaprio.
You may have that chronology backwards.
Prince Andrew needs more friends………….
In my imagination it sounds like Cookie Puss.
Its that sentence that made me go, ahhhhh that’s why its got the same film rating as Showgirls. It’s not sexuality or nudity
I read another review that said she is naked for much of the film and there is an extended shot of her giving head to JFK (I assume simulated). Sounds like the movie may have earned it NC-17.
Thats all pretty notable but I don’t know if NC 17 notable. But when combined with everything else, yeah I get it.
Well, the producers *wanted* to dig up JFK’s corpse and use it for realism, but you know how the Kennedys are. So, yes, simulated.
no the recurring 3-way scenes might have more to do with that then the 2001 fetus-baby
Two abortions from the point of view of the fetus?A very bold cinematic choice, but that ain’t my cuppa.
Didn’t Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell do an episode like this?
According to the honorable Amy Coney Barrett, yes, yes they do. And their little tiny innocent souls exit their bodies and are flung into Limbo.
To hang out with David Strathairn and Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio?
This is breaking my brain.
Are they like scenes in movies or tv shows that are set in a dentist’s office and the point-of-view shot is out of the patient’s mouth from the inside?
It sounds like Vincent Price at the end of The Fly
So it’s like in Enter the Void, but in reverse?Is it grosser, longer? How many Gaspar Noe’’s should this be rated?
The only way it would be accurate is if the screen was black and sound was muffled underwater.
Sort of, yeah.
The review had me interested in watching for Ana de Armas’s performance, and then that line gave me pause.
I dunno, something about this doesn’t sit right with me. Marilyn Monroe had a bad enough life, you don’t need to make up even worse stuff to torture us with for three hours.
Reminds me a little bit of that Amazon holocaust series that felt it needed to make up atrocities, I don’t see a reason to do that.
Thats a shame, I quite adored assassination of jessie james, maybe dry narration would help? Probably not, I’m conflicted because on one hand I’m all for injecting humanity into someone who’s more myth then human now. But the source material isn’t something written by a historian, its narrative fiction and I know how audiences don’t tend to bother fact checking. Mixed bag seems to definitely be the word.
I’m so tired of this mass-regurgitated, manufactured Twitter outrage. Every biopic in existence crafts a narrative based on facts. If there’s something untrue in the book or movie, aside from unknowable conversations and feelings, what are they? People harp on the dramatization aspect for the story without considering that no biopic is a documentary.
Documantries are hardly perfect either for the record. There’s also a world of difference between Assassination of Jessie James and say, American Sniper or Braveheart. Nothing is 100 percent accurate but there are things you can get away with. Someone in a 1866 set movie using a gun from 1870 doesn’t really matter, now if someone who was in reality a scumbag is depicted heroically, that does tend to matter. If you worked on any historical academia you’d understand.
I think you meant to say, “If you were as pretentious as me, you’d have the same opinion.” I ask again, what did the book/movie get wrong? Unless it takes egregious license with the facts, no one should care.
Well we can start with the abortions part is absolutely false. Autopsy confirmed that never happened. All the rape allegations are complicated as Monroe herself only ever talked about sexual abuse when she was a child and all the stories from the Hollywood come from really unreliable sources such as the famously trashy Halloween Babylon book. Same goes with many of the sexual relationships, its all he said she said, there’s also a part about Joe DeMaggio being abusive and that is very doubful. The book also kinda got into conspiracy theories about her death but I think this film skipped that thankfully. Its a novel that takes a sad womans story that ended with suicide and cranks up the misery to 11 when that’s really not needed. Its like taking one of the victims of Jack the ripper and claiming she was dying of the plague.
There are many accounts that Joe DiMaggio, was, in fact,
physically abusive, most notably as a reaction to her famous Seven Year
Itch subway scene. When she filed for divorce, she accused him of
“mental cruelty” in the paperwork. Even if he never really laid a hand on her, he was a piece of shit and it’s not a stretch for him to be a wife beater.
I tried to find any reference to her autopsy proving that she did not have abortions, but in actuality, the report found nothing suggesting abnormalities that can result
from a so-called back alley abortion performed by unskilled hands. Amy
Greene and Henry Rosenfeld, close friends of Monroe, both said that she
did. Most search hits referencing the autopsy as proof were just people
like you in the comments section who simply didn’t like the idea of
their icon having an abortion.She also had an ectopic
pregnancy she needed an abortion for, which there is documentation of,
as well as two miscarriages, which require an abortion if it was at
least near the end of the first trimester. The pill hadn’t been invented
until two years before she died, and condoms weren’t exactly commonplace then, either.
It’s also less likely there are any Hollywood starlets from that era that didn’t
get raped. Seriously, it was a world of Harvey Weinsteins. Where the
book/film takes license is the JFK assault, and from what I’m hearing, I
would find it distasteful as well (I hated The Girl With A Dragon
Tattoo for the same reason, Swedish version, avoided the Fincher
version).Still, as controversial and exploitative this choice might be,
it’s still under the purview of artistic license. Real people don’t
live their lives within the structure of an arc within three acts, their
lives are many stories. The movie chooses to focuses on the tragic
aspect of her life, and someone’s takeaway might be that the film suggests she lived a joyless existence, but it is only telling bits and pieces that form
one story. License always plays a part in biopics to give more
narrative clarity where none can be found in real life. Maybe these
scenes improve the story, I can’t say until I’ve seen it, but if the concern is being disrespectful to Marilyn Monroe specifically, a film whose intent is to sympathize
with her should put that to rest. It’s more disrespectful towards the
named historical figures who are depicted as mistreating her, and I’m
having a hard time caring about any of them.
Well that is because Braveheart is straight bullshit and a character assassination of Robert the Bruce. Wallace was a traitor to the Highlands and working with the British, not Robert.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce
To be fair, that’s kind of par for the course in any Mel Gibson “historical” movie. “The Patriot” got a lot of facts wrong about the American Revolution as well.
Also, this isn’t just a biopic, it’s an adaptation of a rather critically acclaimed novel. Which actually begins with description of what things the author added (and simplified; Monroe grew up in a series of foster homes and the novel reduces it to just one, for example).
The novel is basically a written biopic, as biopics/historical dramatizations tend to take similar license, such as a large group of scientists being amalgamated into one character in Chernobyl, or Mark Zuckerberg being not as big of a dick in The Social Network.
“But as she experiences more success with films like The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, an infrastructure of doctors and makeup artists assembles (or gets assembled) around her to ensure she looks like Monroe, and when she needs painkillers, feels like her too.”Uh…what?
I dunno, man. Makes perfect sense to me.
It feels like her when she becomes drugged. Didn’t confuse me at all.
A comma is required between AND and WHEN. That’s it. A missing comma can really destroy a sentence.
Without having seen this, Cannavale and Brody seem jaw droppingly miscast, but I will withhold further judgement until I see it..
Do we get to watch her fuck, or what?
It’s unfortunate that this sounds more like Hollywood starlet Passion of the Christ than it is a voice for a tragic figure in a cautionary tale, but I can’t ignore a prominent Ana de Armas acting showcase after being so completely, overwhelmingly impressed by her in just a few films in recent years.
Nick Cave and Warren EllisWait, that Warren Ellis?
By “that Warren Ellis”, do you mean this Warren Ellis:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Ellis_(musician)Or this Warren Ellis?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_EllisIf one, yes. If the other, no.
“His name’s not Warren!”
Yeah, no, the accent is distracting. And it’s not occasional. Ultimately, the best thing the film does for her, oddly, is that it lasts long enough for you to get on the performance’s wavelength, which would seem extremely mannered and inauthentic (again, the accent) in a shorter time. Eventually, you admire the work she put in.
Never got Monroe’s popularity. If not for the gay community, she’d be a blip. And she didn’t bang Kennedy. Read American Tabloid. Kennedy specifically requested sleazy Vegas hookers from his mob connections. And Armas? Yeah, the bad accent slips are ridiculous. Some writer here has a crush.
From everything I’ve read about this movie, I’m still perplexed how it got an nc-17 rating.
Because they don’t have a rating for “Not Suitable For ANYONE”?
Let’s be honest, I just want to know if Ana de Armas is going to be naked a whole ton in this movie, or if we’ll just have to stick with all the other movies that she’s naked a whole ton in.
There is a few of those.
You missed the entire point of the movie. It is not about Marlyin Monroe or Norma Jean. Its a story about a woman dealing with Hollywood at that time. The movie “Blonde” demonstrates a tragic story of a poor woman in a patrical sociefty with trauma who becomes famous, similar to Maylin Monroe’s story. The fictional story demonstrates how a woman experiences the world and trauma. This film has a clear and accurate depiction of how trauma impacts the brain and functioning of humans. The movie is based on a fictional book written by a woman at thst time period with trauma and many of her novels are about how people are impacted by trauma. Its not meant to make people learn about a famous person or have a happy depiction of life. These are real things that have happened to real people- its a glimpse into the mind of someone with trauma.