"Blonde" review: The controversy is earned, but misplaced

"Blonde," 2022, directed by Andrew Dominik

★★☆☆☆

A month on from “Blonde”’s streaming release on Netflix, it’s difficult to begin the film with no expectations. Some have slammed Andrew Dominik’s nearly three-hour adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novelization of Marilyn Monroe’s life as needless torture porn that insults the real Monroe, while its defenders have characterized it as a horrifying, poignant social commentary on iconography and sexual violence akin to David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”. While there are some central ideas in “Blonde” that do feel successfully empathic and sensitively plaintive, far more of it comes across as dated, obtuse, and ethically disordered. Even with some arguably revolutionary technical work from cinematographer Chayse Irvin and a beautifully disturbing score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, “Blonde” is anything but culturally enduring or coherent.

The film mostly features events from Monroe’s real life, and it hones its focus on the abuse that she suffered from countless sources throughout. First, from her paranoid schizophrenic mother, and later from rapist movie executives and abusive husbands. The film follows her entire life from her childhood to her likely suicide by overdose at just 36 years old. The approach that Dominik takes is arguably reminiscent of Lynch, and the entirety of the film takes on a diaphanous, nightmarish tone.

Ana De Armas stars as Monroe, and while her performance is largely convincing, Dominik’s writing of Monroe as a character lets her down greatly. He makes a clear attempt to create a divide between Marilyn and Norma Jeane (Monroe’s legal given name) as two separate entities. The intentional focus on this concept is ultimately a marker of the film’s shallowness. Monroe herself is characterized as damaged, dazed, and emotionally stunted. The script frequently calls attention to her absent father figure, as if to claim that many of her struggles stemmed from his truancy. All of these writing impediments seem to contradict Dominik’s thesis, which a good-faith viewer would likely interpret as an indictment of the patriarchy and sexual exploitation in Hollywood. By placing blame on Monroe’s psychological struggles, and especially on an absence of masculinity, Dominik removes a level of responsibility from the actual perpetrators of rape and sexual assault, poking holes in his own transparently faux-feminist rhetoric. The moments that portray the sexual violence are suitably horrifying and upsetting, making these inconsistencies all the more confusing. 

Perhaps in different hands, under different circumstances, an adaptation of Oates’ novel could have been compelling and necessary. If one can engage with the film in a way that interprets Monroe as a symbol separate from reality, as a faceless woman who endures the pain and suffering that countless women have experienced in the film industry, there are formal elements buried in “Blonde” that are incredibly successful at evoking empathy. The problem, though, is that Dominik makes viewing his film in this way virtually impossible. He clearly has an unhealthy fixation on Monroe’s real life, and frequently shifts aspect ratio and color grade to match real photographs and footage from reality. He seems to want to unpack what led to her untimely death, and characterizes her as a doomed, unwell child. It all becomes even more infuriating when the film introduces unborn fetuses that accost Monroe for aborting them, eerily emulating pro-life propaganda in a way that feels ugly and insensitive in a post-Roe world. This obsession with the specificities of Monroe’s reality are at odds with the arguments of many an adherent of “Blonde”, who posit that the film works best when divorced from Monroe’s personhood. 

Dominik’s seemingly absent morals tragically detract from some of the film’s much stronger elements, notably some seemingly impossible rack focuses and beautiful lighting that silhouettes subjects in stark scenes. Internal framing, eerie closeups, and surrealistic handheld camerawork also stand out and are complemented by dissonant, haunting music. All this feels trivial, though, when the film is examined as the hollow text that it is.

It seems likely that the widely negative reception to “Blonde” was at least partly due to some significantly tone-deaf marketing choices by Netflix, who promoted the film as a humanistic biopic, but even outside of these conditions it likely would have still been rightly panned as unnecessarily cruel. “Blonde” is now streaming on Netflix.