‘Blonde’ review: Ana de Armas is a bombshell but Netflix’s Marilyn Monroe movie is brutal misery
Spencer,” “Blonde” aims to capture the horror show of a famous woman’s life. That’s where the similarities end: Whereas the Princess Diana drama was a beautiful nightmare, the ballyhooed new Marilyn Monroe drama is brutal misery.
Written and directed by Andrew Dominik (“Killing Them Softly”) – and slapped with an extremely adult rating – “Blonde” (★★ out of four; rated NC-17; streaming Wednesday on Netflix) finds Ana de Armas at her career best. She inhabits the iconic Hollywood bombshell in a fictionalized narrative that separates and explores her public and private personas.
Although there are insightful moments and surreal bits that pop, it’s overall a bizarre – and at nearly three hours, bloated – film that attempts to honor its subject and instead lets her down.
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Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel, “Blonde” introduces Norma Jeane as a 7-year-old girl who survives a traumatic event and is essentially orphaned when her mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson) is hospitalized and all she knows of her absent dad is a single picture. (We’ll get back to him in a minute.) The movie quickly shifts to adult Norma Jeane embarking on an acting career, adopting the Marilyn persona and having to submit sexually to a Tinseltown power player.
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Constantly waiting for her real father to show up, she’s a woman with daddy issues who calls her lovers “Daddy,” which is more infantilizing than it is endearing. De Armas gamely plays the character through a wide gamut of emotions and psychological breakdowns, including one weird scene where she has a conversation with a computer-generated image fetus. Dominik frequently puts the viewer in her dreamy, discombobulating perspective, yet Marilyn’s torturous journey – involving so many crying jags – is equally painful to watch.
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The instance no one will soon forget is a sexual encounter involving Marilyn and The President – one guess as to which one – where her internal monologue wonders how she got there, really driving home the division between the main character’s dueling identities. Although de Armas spends a lot of time in a state of undress, the NC-17 rating seems like overkill and suggests a more hardcore movie than it actually is. (There are instances of sexual assault and abusive violence, but they’re more implied than seen.)
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