Reproductive Failure — Blonde review

A version of this was originally published in The Scotsman in September 2022.

Kicking off his career with the scabrously funny Chopper and belatedly following it up with the artful Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik is no stranger to rooted-in-reality films that explore the dark, violent side of celebrity. With his Marilyn Monroe film Blonde, though, he indulges that obsession without really illuminating anything original about fame’s destructive allure. Re-imagining Monroe’s life as a somewhat abstract Freudian nightmare full of sex and suffering and hallucinatory fashion photography framing, the film doesn’t present itself as a biopic in the traditional sense. Like the acclaimed Joyce Carol Oates novel from which Dominik has adapted his script, it uses the imagery, mythology and some of the biographical and historical details of Monroe’s life and times as a jumping off point for a sensationalist, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tacky, sometimes plain wacky portrait of the birth of modern celebrity.

Starring No Time To Die’s Ana de Armas as Marilyn, the film is certainly a full-on assault on the senses. Whether switching between different aspect ratios, jumping between stark black-and-white and vivid technicolour, or bringing to life famous photoshoots and deepfake clips from Monroe’s most famous movies, the film’s chaotic structure feels, on the surface at least, like a way of presenting Marilyn as someone overwhelmed and disconnected from her studio-constructed image, someone whose  onscreen life masks the pain and shame of being an abused and abandoned child growing up on the fringes of Hollywood dream factory. Dig a little deeper though and, despite its anti-biopic stance, it still follows the standard womb-to-the-tomb structure beloved of the genre. As it piles on frequently gaudy visuals, on-the-nose symbolism and tedious musings on the cosmic significance of its subject’s existence, the movie it most closely resembles is Oliver Stone’s Jim Morrison biopic The Doors, albeit without the entertainment factor.

It also never really gets beyond the Candle in the Wind clichés Elton John sang about in his original recording of his Marilyn-inspired song of the same name. That maudlin ballad is, of course, now more associated with Princess Diana — another tragic blonde victim of the celebrity age whose life and death have become national obsessions. It’s no surprise, then, that like the two recent films about Diana’s life — the archival documentary The Princess and last year’s bold and brilliant Spencer — Blonde comes off more like a horror movie, a garish amalgam of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (especially the fracturing fairytale reality of an aspiring Hollywood starlet) and the patriarchal gaslighting terror of Roman Polanski’s satanic-themed Rosemary’s Baby. In Blonde, however, the men in Marilyn’s world conspire to prevent her from having a child, the aftermath of one enforced abortion — chillingly rendered with night vision cameras — becoming one of the film’s most disturbing and effective scenes.

Part of the problem with the film, though, is that it ultimately reduces Monroe’s life to her reproductive failings. Her various miscarriages and abortions are used to underscore the tragedy of a woman whose mentally unstable mother we see trying to drown her as a child and whose obsession with the mysterious father she never knew becomes the salve she thinks will heal her cracked existence. In a severe taste lapse, or perhaps just paying weird tribute the star-child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dominik repeatedly has Marilyn converse with a late-stage CGI foetus whenever she falls pregnant, then feels the need to deploy special effects to give us trippy point-of-view shots of these dead foetuses exiting Marilyn’s body, as if her cervix is the stargate at the end of the aforementioned Kubrick sci-fi classic.

But there are tawdry taste lapses through-out. A scene depicting John F Kennedy forcing Marilyn to fellate him while an aide talks to him on the phone about the impending scandals of his extra-marital dalliances keeps cutting away to comically coy television footage of missiles being readied for launch. And more than once Dominik’s camera alights on a graphic image of Marilyn’s pristine white underwear being forcibly removed by a studio executive so that he – Dominik – can later make a crass connection between her violent start in the film business and the iconic image of her billowing white dress rising up over her underwear in The Seven Year Itch, the shooting of which he turns into a critique of the pervasiveness of the leering male gaze as crowds of men whoop in ghastly delight, their faces distorting like the damned inhabitants of a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape.

That’s certainly a valid connection to make and Oates’ novel, first published in 2000, has retrospectively been re-appraised as a prophetic exposé of the venality of the movie industry in the wake of #MeToo and the Harvey Weinstein revelations. But its attempt to ironise the abuse of women to make a point about the exploitation of its subject’s body is a tricky thing to pull off in a movie that frequently objectifies its own rising star. De Armas is sensational in the role and she gives everything to Blonde in a performance that’s simultaneously fearless and fragile. But she’s also limited by the film’s disinterest in depicting Marilyn as a creative artist, as a gifted comedy performer, as a savvier-than-expected operator, or as a serious actress with intellectual curiosities all her own.

It pays lip service to some of these things, mostly to reinforce the predatory control exerted over her life by studio heads, lovers, agents and husbands. But even when it subtly decries the double standards at work in the industry, as in a magnificent audition scene in which Marilyn’s dedication to the still-nascent Method acting style is dismissed as a sign of mental illness, Blonde doesn’t counter it with anything to show how great a performer she really was. All there is is pain and misery, and de Armas is stuck playing Marilyn as a kind of empty vessel, a construct through which an abused little girl called Norma Jean Baker was dragged into the celebrity maelstrom and left to fend for herself.