Written by Grady Fiorio
Original Publishing Date: October 5th, 2022
Rating 1/5
A tragedy in more ways than one.
The boldest of swings incur the boldest of misses. If there's one thing critics can agree on about the film Blonde, is that it is bold. Based on the novel Blonde by Joyce Carol Oats, the film tells a fictionalized version of the tragedy of Norma Jeane, aka Marylin Monroe. Recently Blonde has been the talk of the town in the world of film. Covered in controversy, and slapped with an NC-17 rating from the MPAA, Blonde has been marred by production nightmares and questionable creative choices. As Andrew Dominik's first narrative feature in ten years, Blonde marks a big achievement for the director. As a long-time passion project, Blonde has been in development for twelve years. Given the source material, Blonde was always going to be a controversial film, but it didn't have to be a bad one. Clocking in at nearly three hours Blonde is a tall order for any audience member, but is it worth your time? Probably not.
While on paper Blonde is a film about Marylin Monroe, it's really about the parasocial relationship between an audience, a star, and the industry they inhabit. Dominik puts us the viewers in the hot seat, as we experience Marylin Monroe's overstimulating abuse by both Hollywood and as an idol on the world's stage. Monroe serves as the vehicle for the experience of many women in the entertainment industry, however, she is given such little actual character development that the film ends up becoming a montage of abuse without the substance or empathy to give context to the onscreen horrors. The experience of watching Blonde is like watching a mannequin get beat up for three hours.
If I'm going to be brutally honest with you, this movie is batshit insane. To do this review any justice, I'm going to spoil the shit out of this movie, just like it spoils the guts of Marylin Monroe onto the screen for damn near three hours. To give you a lowdown of some of the craziness this movie throws out, there are shots from inside Monroe's vagina as she gets an abortion, followed by multiple scenes where Marylin Monroe talks to the CGI ghosts of her many aborted fetuses (fetusi? hot spicy fetoos?), the omnipresent smiling ghost of Monroe's father staring at the camera, finally topped off with a near constant stream of rape. This movie doesn't hold back, so neither will I. From here on out, you've been warned.
Something that both critics and supporters seem to agree on is Ana de Armas' performance as Monroe. I hate to be the snobby contrarian, but I just don't see it. Don't get me wrong I like Ana de Armas. She's clearly a talented and passionate actress, and I think she has proven herself multiple times before, but Blonde does her no favors. Ana looks the part, but she does not sound the part. This was one of the biggest points of contention when the casting was announced, her Cuban accent. Plain and simple, Ana couldn't shed the accent. It's distracting and never lets up through the entirety of the film. It's no fault of her own, this was just a miscast. It also doesn't help that writing is awful. The dialogue is straight out of a 14-year-old's dream journal, who thinks they know meaningful writing because their Tumblr feed was bombarded by black and white photos with "sad" quotes like "The biggest smiles frown the hardest". Mix in the word "daddy" about 300,000 times, add stilted dialogue pulled from the 1800s, bake at 350 °F for 2 hours and 47 minutes, and you get the screenplay for Blonde. Characters are thinly veiled caricatures, without depth or complexities, and the film's scenarios and scenes are cringe-inducing in the worst way possible. It is mesmerizingly bad. Someone wrote this, thought "yeah this is good" and then burned $22 million to scribble this artistic mess on screen. When you deal with such heavy subject matters such as rape, abuse, and drug addiction, you have to treat it with tact and respect, otherwise, the effect of the message is lost. While I do believe that Dominik's intentions were wholly honest and earnest, it doesn't change the fact that Blonde doesn't do a good job of presenting and examining its themes.
While I wish I could say Blonde's narrative woes are balanced out by its technical achievements, this is sadly not the case. Yes, there are some brief moments where the cinematography does look nice but as a whole, the film has no consistent creative voice. It's a stylistic mess of changing aspect ratios, frame rates, shooting styles, and jumps between color and black and white. While there could be some narrative justifications for such radical stylistic changes, Blonde always feels more sporadic and pretentious than it does intentional. At a certain point, the film becomes such a collage of sight and sound that it all turns into one giant blur, especially with such a meaty runtime. There are large portions of the film that I don't even remember because of how much of it mushes together. The feeling is meant to emulate the bombardment of sensation and attention that was inflicted upon Monroe. However at nearly three hours long, what could have been an effective style of storytelling turns into visual mush, racking your brain like an endless game of pinball, in the least engaging way possible.
That's not to say every scene is bad. Some of Dominik's techniques do show that somewhere in this heaping mess is a small sparkling of brilliance. The scene that encapsulates this best is during the premiere of Some Like it Hot. Throughout the film, we see snippets of Marylin attending the premieres of her many films. Nearing the third act, Monroe is now a shell of her former self. Used and abused by seemingly every man in Hollywood, she is emotionally drained and dead. She shows up to the premiere and is constantly hounded by fans and paparazzi in what seems like tidal waves of shouting and camera flashes. As Marylin continues to puppeteer a smile, a long winding noise ramps up to near deafening levels. Hard cut to the inside of the theater, the noise continuing to build. Instead of the film being projected on the theater screen, a series of distorted lines spin rapidly matching the tone of the disturbing winding noise. Then, in an instant everything stops and the projection cuts to the ending of Some Like It Hot. "Well nobody's perfect!" The audience then roars to a standing ovation, however, the footage of the audience is sped up and scrambled, making them seem more like mice scurrying for their next piece of cheese rather than celebrating the accomplishments of artists. It's hard to describe the power of the scene without seeing it firsthand, but for a brief few minutes, it felt like David Lynch took the reigns of the beauty in the madness. Seeing this scene on an IMAX sound and screen was a transcendent experience that perfectly encapsulates what this film could have been.
While most people will be watching this film at home on Netflix I was lucky enough to see this in IMAX at the film's L.A. premiere at the Chinese Theater, and oh boy was that a ride. Seeing such visceral imagery on a large screen while a booming sound system knocks out my eardrums was a sensation overload. Rape in IMAX! It sounds like a tone-deaf headline to a straight-to-VHS B-movie, but that's the same amount of tact that Dominik treats his subject matter with, and as an audience member you feel it. What you also feel is the noticeable lack of polish, as the film's many technical oversights become even more apparent on an IMAX screen and sound system. To be blunt the audio mix is pretty awful. I consistently heard the audio peaking and the dialogue dipping really low. I even heard people hitting the boom mic a couple of times. If you’re gonna show this on an IMAX system you better actually prepare it for that. It got to a point where I eventually just stopped paying attention to the dialogue because trying to make out the bad writing as it bounced in and out of the soundtrack was just too headache-inducing. Speaking of the soundtrack, there is one big positive to come from this mess of a movie. The score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is genuinely great and does a much better job at conveying the film's ideas than the actual film itself. When it came to the IMAX presentation, the score was an absolute high note. While I won't recommend the film you should absolutely give the music a listen.
As far as the audience goes, clearly, this film has caused quite a stir. At my screening, there were multiple walkouts, and by the time the credits rolled many were in tears, some even being helped out of the theater by friends because they were in such a state of distress. While I never found myself personally offended by the film I can understand why some people did not want to participate. This controversy has sparked an interesting discussion about what is and isn't okay to portray on screen, and even if Andrew Dominik should be allowed to make such a film. While I think any criticism is valid criticism, I do think the idea that an artist should not be allowed to create a specific type of art or depiction of art is absurd. I've heard this talking point getting bounced around by talking heads on the internet and I can't help but think this opinion is entitled and unjustified. Throughout history, the intention of artists has been attacked and vilified by the public yet remained extremely important nonetheless. Whether it be the protest of N.W.A. lyrics or something as dramatic as Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, art has always been a bastion of free speech, and anyone determined to strip that away clearly does not understand the importance of a free artistic society. Artistic censorship comes from the hands of cowards who refuse to challenge ideas based on merit or virtue. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence, but you can't tell someone what they can and can't create.
One of the film's most discussed controversies was the NC-17 rating the film received from the MPAA. So was it deserved? Not really. Now, this might not mean much from the guy who willingly watched Salo twice, but while the film is harsh it doesn't necessarily push the boundaries of an R rating in any extreme ways. The film doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before in an R-rated film, I think it's rather how we see it in Blonde. Dominik uses the camera to accentuate certain scenes that make them feel more graphic and intense without actually showing anything more graphic or intense. It's similar to when Hitchcock got in a fight with the ratings board over the shower scene in Psycho. He argued that the audience never sees any graphic imagery but rather through the use of camera and editing techniques the scene feels so much more heightened. While Blonde is certainly more graphic than Psycho, it employs the same idea to nauseating effect. This is most clear during the soon-to-be infamous JFK scene near the end of the film. You won't see anything you haven't seen before, however, you will see things in a way you haven't seen before.
Of all the issues I had with this film, one thing that I do applaud is Netflix's support of the film and the vision of Dominik. When the NC-17 rating came back they could have easily forced Dominik to chop it up and try again, but instead, they stuck to their guns and supported an artist's vision. Even when the vision of a director is bad I'm glad that a studio went and took the chance to support it anyways. In a world ever dominated by studio films that minimize the creative voice of their director, we need more studios taking bold chances like Blonde. Even though there is a great chance of failure, there is also a great chance of liberating success.
Even though were are left with this mess on our hands, could there have been a way to make Blonde work? I believe so. The answer is simply in its runtime. Blonde is at its best when it is at its most surreal. Instead of trying to craft a narrative, it crafts a feeling. If Blonde was cut down to 40 minutes and focused on these moments it could have been a masterpiece. The film's feint moments of genius do a good job to put you in a mindset without employing a direct narrative. Film is one of the ultimate tools of empathy, and this could have easily been a vehicle for that. This would have been a much better film in the hands of a director such as David Lynch. His philosophy of filmmaking would lend itself nicely to this type of character. He's already proved that he can tell stories about women dealing with trauma with films such as Fire Walk with Me and Mulholland Drive. There is a clear missed potential here and it's crushing to think about what could have been.
At the end of nearly three hours, Blonde is sadly nothing but a drunken rampage from the mind of Andrew Dominik told through the Cuban voice of Marylin Monroe. It may be made with passion but it's misguided in its execution. It’s a carrot on a string leading its audience in a circle, never actually going anywhere but down. It throws everything at the wall, and it's up to you to duck. In the hands of a different director, Blonde could have been a transformative take on the idea of biopics, stardom, and media influence. I wasn't ever offended by Blonde but I was disappointed in its squandered potential.
Director Andrew Dominik
Runtime 2 Hr 47 Min
Format Digital (IMAX)
Release Date 2022