Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s 166-minute fantasia inspired by the fragile psyche of Marilyn Monroe, which is premiering at Venice International Film Festival this evening, is already hugely controversial, arriving after years of delays. Even the trailer caused a fracas on the internet last month, when detractors took issue with Ana de Armas, who plays the actor in the new film, for occasionally reverting to her native Cuban accent and, despite tremendous efforts by the star and the hair and make-up team, for her lack of physical resemblance to her fellow actor. If nothing else, it is touching how protective people still feel towards Monroe 60 years after her death.
A troubled beauty with a radiant screen presence, Monroe makes for an ideal and achingly tragic muse: she’s the luminous star used and abused by Hollywood, lonely and self-medicating at the centre of her fame. Her abusive childhood, failed marriages and famous paramours contoured a terrifyingly vulnerable person who inspired Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem, among many others, to write about her.
Dominik’s film is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ bullet-stoppingly thick book — it’s 738 pages long — of the same name. Published in 2000, it lightly, and also controversially, fictionalises Monroe’s life, only thinly veiling some of its characters. Monroe’s husbands Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller are referred to as the Ex-athlete and the Playwright, for example. Monroe’s rumoured relationships with the Kennedy brothers are truncated into a love affair with the “President” and a conspiratorial account of the star’s murder by an assassin dispatched by one “RF”. Oates’ work hangs uncomfortably between a critique of Monroe’s exploitation and, well, exploitation.
[ Andrew Dominik talks to Donald Clarke about BlondeOpens in new window ]
It’s a conundrum amplified in almost every frame of Dominik’s adaptation. And, no, it’s not enough to claim that because Monroe was treated like meat, the movie must do likewise. A scene depicting the subway-grate sequence from Monroe’s film The Seven Year Itch — and the attendant publicity stunt in New York — includes the wolf whistles that Monroe must have heard while simultaneously lingering on her thigh gap. De Armas is repeatedly and needlessly topless, bloodied or both.
Deepfake insertions of de Armas into some of Monroe’s best-known film scenes are technically impressive if wholly unconvincing. Artifice may be the point
Away from the prurience, there are things to admire about the scope and audacity of Dominik’s unapologetically art-house interpretation. Individual images — the distorted mouths of braying men at the premiere of Some Like It Hot, the squiggled-out face of Miller (played by Adrien Brody) as Monroe stumbles home in a haze of barbiturates — linger and disturb. A menage-a-trois between Monroe, Charlie “Cass” Chaplin jnr and Edward G Robinson jnr is rendered as streaks of colour and mirrored distortions. The earliest sections, concerning Monroe’s abusive, damaged mother (played by Julianne Nicholson), are as upsetting as they are compelling. Bobby Cannavale’s Ex-Athlete is a terror.
Deepfake insertions of de Armas into some of Monroe’s best-known scenes, including the Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend musical number, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and as the recipient of unfriendly career advice from George Sanders in All About Eve, are technically impressive if wholly unconvincing. Artifice may be the point. Blonde is an airless enterprise. Even intimate scenes feel as if they were shot remotely and spliced later. The shallow staging is complemented by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s shrill, nightmare-soap-opera score, which seems calculated to induce migraine.
[ Marilyn Monroe: Assaulted by a Hollywood mogul, killed by the Kennedys?Opens in new window ]
It’s no surprise that many sections of Oates’ whopping novel, including Monroe’s traumatic years in an orphanage, her modelling career and her first marriage — fictionally to Bucky, who works for Lockheed; in real life a policeman named James Dougherty — have been excised. What’s more surprising, and disturbing, are some of the changes made to the source material. Cass and Eddy G — played, respectively, by Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams, and who in Oates’ book are as victimised by the Hollywood system as Monroe is — are conniving rotters in the film, with uncomfortable echoes of homophobic public-service films of the 1950s. The star’s death is reframed to directly implicate these former lovers rather than the Kennedys.
Monroe’s decline, meanwhile, comes too hard and too fast. For most of the film’s final hour de Armas has little to do but scream and cry. The despair is palpable; the dramatic purpose is not. Blonde frames Monroe, stylishly and icily, as a hysterical woman. She deserves better.
Blonde is at the Irish Film Institute, in Dublin, from Friday, September 23rd, until Wednesday, September 28th; it will also be available on Netflix from September 28th
