Andrew Dominik’s Blonde revels in Marilyn Monroe’s misery

If you want to sit through two hours and 46 minutes of agony and abuse, then Blonde has you sorted. But who does?

Blonde is streaming now on Netflix.

If you think Blonde is going to be a conventional biopic about Marilyn Monroe, you’re in for a rude shock.

Andrew Dominik’s film is an artful, moody and visually bold challenge to the staid celebrity life story, but it is also an exhausting and stomach-churning work that sucks the life and joy out of one of the most enduring icons of pop culture.

Monroe was a complex and multifaceted person whose traumas and demons drove her to her demise, but she also had verve and an effervescence which fuelled an irrepressible onscreen magnetism.

If you took Blonde as a definitive account of Monroe’s life – which, to be fair, it doesn’t purport to be, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalised novel – all you’d come away with is that she was deeply anguished and emotionally or physically abused by almost everyone she came across.

Blonde is packaging up abject misery with a splashy art house sheen.

Blonde is directed by Andrew Dominik.

Starring Ana De Armas as Monroe, the film charts her life from her menacing childhood to her lonely death, each act structured by the figures who did her such damage.

First it was her mother (Julianne Nicholson), who tried to drown her, then it was the studio executive who raped her, her husband Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) who abused her, her next husband Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) who used her and then John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) who forced her to perform fellatio while she was high.

It’s two hours and 46 minutes of agony after agony.

The rare moments of happiness or even contentment – the early days with Miller, a supposed throuple with the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson – are jarring fantasies against endless nightmares.

Nothing about Blonde feels real, it seems to only deal in the surreal. That’s an artistic choice that can work – as it did in Spencer – if you allowed your character to have interiority and dimensions.

Ana de Armas is luminous as Monroe.

De Armas is luminous and she convincingly sells Monroe’s despair but she’s not given the opportunity to really present a whole character.

If this had been a film made about a fictional person, it would feel too-over-the-top and lurid, so to have a real person’s name and legacy attached, it’s even more unbelievable.

Dominik has never been a subtle filmmaker – his debut was Chopper – and he deploys gratuitous extremes such as talking foetuses to make points that would’ve been much more powerful with other choices.

It’s a distressing, incomplete exploration of a woman and one which, by Dominik’s own admission, was shaped by her suicide at age 36. The Australian filmmaker has said that the most important thing to him about Monroe’s story was that she killed herself.

He’s said he wasn’t interested in how she fought the studios for some semblance of control over her life and career.

He wasn’t interested in how she set up her own production arm, or how she stood up for colleagues during the anti-communist witch hunt which engulfed Hollywood. Or that there were women in her life with whom she formed deep friendships.

Blonde revels in Marilyn Monroe’s misfortunes.

Dominik tossed all that aside because it didn’t fit in with his reductive vision.

The filmmaker flattens this layered human being to only a victim, a plaything of a relentless Hollywood machine which robbed her of her agency.

In Blonde, Dominik does the same, projecting his narrow perception of who she was to say something about fame and suffering.

Dominik does the very thing Blonde is trying to condemn – exploiting Monroe’s image and legacy to further his own agenda.

Rating: 2/5

Blonde is streaming now on Netflix

Originally published as Andrew Dominik’s Blonde revels in Marilyn Monroe’s misery