Like many in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) was a stage name for the blonde starlet.  Born as Norma Jeane (Lilly Fisher) to a single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), the girl is taken to an orphanage after one of her mother’s episodes and is deemed unfit to raise a child.  With a head full of stories about the allure of Hollywood – all the glamor and fame just waiting to be experienced – Norma Jeane sets out to become an actress.  The town quickly falls in love with her beauty, but that love is fueled by lust more than anything as she is made into one of the most iconic sex symbols whose influence is still felt today. 

Andrew Dominik’s years-in-the-making passion project, Blonde, was released on Netflix with a scandalous NC-17 rating.  At a punishing 166-minutes, the cradle to the grave biopic seeks to bring context to the Monroe legacy, but it never quite fulfills on that good intention.  Instead, the feel-bad drama consistently checks in on its star at her lowest point, and while there are anchor points of fact peppered throughout, Dominik, working off a script he adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, dramatizes many moments of fiction and assumption detailing the inner workings of Marilyn’s thoughts; things we could never know, especially as she passed at the age of 36 in 1962. Dominik’s obsession with the tragic here is the first of many flaws for the project as he presumably seeks to show how Marilyn Monroe was an abused star that fell from grace due to the exploitation of those around her, but because he never allows Marilyn in Blonde to achieve anything, she has nowhere to fall from and it becomes just another extension of the exploitation she faced in life, now some 60 years after her death.    

Leading the film is de Armas in what should be a career-defining role, but the messy production really holds her back from greatness.  The lack of agency Monroe had over her own career is a huge part of how she ended up on the track she did, and Blonde does not allow her any more control over her own narrative so that it plays out like a compilation of all of her lowest moments. The issue is that Monroe grew to fight the image the studio system was pushing, but in Blonde she is neutered and rendered toothless, resigned to accept what the powers that be push down onto her. She becomes her own unreliable narrator as Dominik’s plotting and structure never allow the star to be seen in a graceful light.  De Armas is still a magnetic force on screen through her physicality, but the script finds her playing the same emotional register of being on the verge of a breakdown throughout the entire film that she is not able to flex much as a performer. This is not a slight towards the actress who fills the screen with grace in what should have been an early career capstone, but rather a knock at the misguided and ill-composed script extending from an already exploitative source material. 

Blonde finds de Armas in many moments of recreation of some of Monroe’s most iconic moments in print and on screen, and to Dominik’s credit, these scenes are the highlight of the film as they feel incredibly natural.  They do not look like cheap imitations, and despite the meticulous attention to recreating every detail, they do not feel overly manufactured, either.  When it came to building the world of the film, the production design was led by Florencia Martin with sets decorated by Erin Fite and costumes by Jennifer Johnson.  Hair was led by Jaime Leigh McIntosh and makeup by Tina Roesler Kerwin, whose work helped to establish the period and recreate the iconic blonde’s signature looks. It is also a benefit that many of these recreations take place on sound stages, so it forces the imagination of the audience while also allowing Dominik to keep up this feeling that we are in a nightmarish fantasy. It gives a sense that nothing we are seeing is truly real but rather the experience as filtered through Marylin’s mind and memories. This is but one example of Dominik showcasing his fluency in film language, and it is one of the most frustrating things about Blonde because it is technically very well put together.   

The film stays grounded enough that it never devolves into logicless nonsense, but there is a consistent feeling of unease throughout.  This is achieved by a nauseating fluctuation of various aspect ratios as well as switching between black and white photography and color.  The choices were made with intention as Chayse Irvin’s camera and lens selection all stay consistent with the various people and periods in which Marilyn finds herself, but the purpose of why these decisions were made is unclear.  As is, it just serves to help disorient the audience and it becomes more of a nuisance in its obtuse and ultimately-functionless employment.  Further, almost all of the film has a glow about it which, in its excess, makes it an incredibly ugly film to look at. It is as if Irvin was instructed to try and recreate the look of Roger Deakins’ similarly dreamlike cinematography from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Dominik’s meditative western. The lens flares and Malick-Esque style worked well to capture to golden sun and grasses of 1880s frontier America, but it is not as effective in evoking the big studio lot lights of Hollywood in its heyday. 

While Blonde comes brandished with an NC-17 rating, it leans more towards a work of trauma porn than a sexually explicit work.  As if it was not bad enough that Dominik’s script does not allow the Marilyn of Blonde to enjoy any of her successes as a performer, he also chooses to view every aspect of her life through the lens of abuse.  He latches on early to the idea that she allowed all of this abuse to occur because she was seeking validation from men in her life in the absence of her father, and it leaves behind a very bitter taste as none of the abusers are ever shown in even a partially guilty light.  Blonde posits Marilyn as the eternal victim and also saddles her with the guilt and blame for the actions of those around her.  The casting couch is an unfortunate part of Hollywood’s history, but in the post-Weinstein era, the gross mishandling of this abuse of power is not adding authenticity to the period of the film, it is a disgusting continuation of the exploitation of Marylin Monroe and the thousands of women that came before and after her, made worse by never allowing the Marylin of Blonde to reach the level of stardom and be able to enjoy that eventual spotlight.  It is often a barren endeavor to judge historical people and practices on what “should have been done” with our modern understanding, even something as blatantly wrong as the abuse of power seen here, but it is helpful to create a narrative that takes our modern sensibilities and forces a conversation between the then and now. Dominik shies away from any of those difficult conversations and, in his silence shows favor to the abusers. Meanwhile, Marylin is always shown to be in a state of victimhood, and if this film is truly trying to let her regain her legacy, it is a fundamental failure. 

Dominik then goes on to show Marylin as a victim of her own person with three traumatic scenes involving the termination of her pregnancies.  She is then haunted by a CGI fetus that claims it was killed by her selfishness.  With all the subtlety of a PureFlix production, this is just another example of the fictional liberties taken in the film that are so out of touch with modern sensibilities, made worse given the ongoing limitation of safe abortion access to women across the country.   

For all the care that was taken to make sure the legacies of the men that used her were able to save face, some of that same compassion and discretion should have been shown to the star this film is supposed to memorialize. Dominik’s script treads carefully around the legacies of Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel), who the film attributes the waking the culture to the sex appeal of the title star, in addition to Eddy Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams). Bold enough to name them, the film surprisingly paints this three-way relationship as not entirely heterosexual, a potentially career-ending accusation given the time period of the film. As for the other men in Marylin’s life, the script is much more protective. There is “Casting Director” (Sonny Valicenti), “Ex-Athlete” (Bobby Cannavale), “The Playwright” (Adrien Brody), and “The President” (Caspar Phillipson) are all given some anonymity to commit their abuse. The script wears its core concepts on its sleeve as it finds Marylin often stating she does not want to be seen as a slab of meat, but through the unfortunate allowances of the industry at the time, she would be passed around the business for her body and sold to magazines, cinema screen, and television sets around the country. Dominik, who writes like he has been living under a rock and is therefore totally unaware of the #MeToo movement, should have struck a better balance between the facts of her life and our current understanding of the scars that these men – and countless others – have left on the industry and our society. But Dominik chooses to protect the abusers and his film is not strong enough to make the case that this is to put us in Marylin’s mindset of being unable to speak out and label these atrocities by name, no, it is because he is wholly uninterested in preserving and propagating the Monroe legacy if it does not involve being able to witness her trauma played out on screen. While the Monroe estate went public with their approval of de Armas’ casting in the title role, it is shocking that they would support this film on a script and story level as it feels like a cruel punishment not only for Monroe, but for survivors of abuse the world around.  

The latest prestige release from Netflix is an unfortunate one. To call Blonde a biopic is a task in and of itself given the large swathes of Monroe’s career as an artist is glossed over. We see it in glimmers as she works through an acting class or self-critiques an audition, but we seldom get to see her working on her craft, cultivating herself as a performer, or focusing on her image; arguably a much more interesting and engaging trajectory than the downward spiral of constant abuse we see instead. It is not just because the film has taken these creative, fictional liberties – biopics are not documentaries – but it is how Dominik’s script uses these moments of fiction to continually tear down the subject that feels so heartless. Quentin Tarantino received a lot of criticism for his revisionist take on his handling of the Manson murders in the leadup to Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019) but by allowing Sharon Tate to live on in the world of that film, he added some hope to her story. There is no hope in Blonde. It is just the newest continuation of the notion that Marylin Monroe was nothing more than a sex symbol – a piece of meat whose lack of a father figure sent her into the arms of any man she met, thereby placing the onus of her tragedy on her own shoulders instead of the villains around her – and the film does nothing to combat that narrative, instead, Dominik, with no signs of shame, promotes that disgusting notion.