Years ago, legendary film critic Roger Ebert went on a tirade about David Lynch's infamous and iconic 1986 film Blue Velvet as he felt that the graphic sex scenes and nudity truly exploited star Isabella Rossellini in an uncomfortable and sleazy manner.
His colleague, Gene Siskel, basically sided with the filmmaker saying that Rossellini "consented" to what she did on the screen.
Maybe that is true...and it seems to be the case all over again with Ana de Armas, who is getting her next big splash onscreen after making a very promising debut in 2019's gem of a murder mystery Knives Out.
In a bit of casting that seems a little odd considering the effort it takes to hide her fairly thick Cuban accent, de Armas was given the task to play one of the most iconic figures in history: Marilyn Monroe...or rather her real-name, Norma Jeane Baker, in Blonde. This "SEMI"-autobiographical film is based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel which essentially told the life of Baker/Monroe with a lot of fictional and exploitative tendencies.
Before I dive more into the film and the performance of de Armas, I want to state quickly about the expectations I sort of held for this film over the past nearly two years.
Andrew Dominik's career has been rather limited, and he only really achieved any kind of significant success with 2007's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford starring Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt. I have no affinity to his work whatsoever and judging by how much he has been touting up his work on Blonde over the past year, he has an ego that seemingly rivals that of Quentin Tarnatino's.
How so?
He was quoted in an interview that he felt Blonde would be seen as one of the ten best films ever made.
So, does that mean that in a decade or so, we will start seeing Blonde appear on the BFI's Sight & Sound poll?
Oooh! Can I answer?!
Please let me answer!!
No.
No, it won't.
Prior to its release, I would hear these comments by Dominik how the film would be dark and different than the standard biopic, and yes, there were many others who seemed to sense that perhaps this was going to be a film that would flirt with the idea of being pure trash.
I sort of had this sense that maybe it would be viewed as a more abstract example of Pablo Larrain's Spencer, last year's biopic that took on a rather unhinged look on a brief moment of Princess Diana's life over one Christmas holiday at Sandringham. That film polarized people immensely and while I certainly responded to it rather mutely at first, I grew to respect it more over time for its rather surreal approach. It certainly fell in the same vein as that director's previous film Jackie, about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis...and that was also a film I actually quite liked more.
I viewed Blonde as being one of those potentially polarizing films that would make me say I wished cinema could be as bold as this all the time.
And yet, despite the film being rather bold and going against the grain in many ways, I find the final results to be frustratingly pretentious, heinously exploitative, and rather offensive to the legacy of Marilyn Monroe.
I am also someone who has never had any real interest in Monroe being just a basic fleeting curiosity being someone who was fascinated by Hollywood and the entertainment industry growing up. She also even delved into my love of political history considering her rather infamous involvement with the Kennedy brothers.
Still though, Monroe was a woman who suffered from great trauma and was thrown into a Hollywood system that ruined her much like it did the likes of someone like Judy Garland.
And you get the sense that Dominik wants to show that Monroe was more than her basic image: blonde, voluptuous, sensual, breathy...along with being a drug/drink addicted kook with daddy issues...and yet, that is all we see.
It is a film that is simply brutal in its approach...and a film that somehow manages to both appall and appeal at the EXACT SAME TIME.
The film is overbearingly long and pretentious and yet, the style and look of it does have moments of interesting flourish. Biopics have become the bane of many film lovers' existence with the frequency in which they become the key part of awards bait season...and yet, here we are. We are given a film that is truly so bold and relentless in its approach that you sort of marvel at it and then quickly find yourself wanting it to calm down.
Through it all, Ana de Armas manages to come out of the film relatively unscathed. Sure, there are some issues with her accent work, and the script can be so brazen that you find yourself sensing that she has about run out of the energy to convey differing levels of tortured emotion, but in the end, she shows real promise here.
After giving such an assured and witty performance amongst the loony chaos of Knives Out, she does prove she has the ability to provide emotional intensity and also the ability to anchor a film.
Is she Oscar worthy for this film? I don't know.
It's still too early to tell and it is all too fresh in my mind, but I will say that I am far more pleased by her performance than I am upset. I do feel like a nomination might be worthy, but with as polarizing as the response has been, I would be surprised to see it happen currently.
Although...if Glenn Close can get nominated for Hillbilly Elegy, then anything is possible.
I did want to quickly single out Julianne Nicholson, who gets a brief but potent supporting role as the unstable mother Gladys.
She manages to imbue her role with a certain energy that is oddly captivating despite being essentially a one-note villain most of the time. I hope she keeps getting cast in more projects, because ever since we watched her scream at Kate Winslet in the car in Mare of Easttown, she proved she is one of the more real and underrated actresses working today.
So yes, Blonde is a film that manages to shock, infuriate, and intrigue you.
At its core, it is an exploitative and cruel film that basically drags the ghost of Monroe through the mud and doesn't want to let up.
That alone is nearly unforgivable.
On top of that, you have a run time of nearly 3 hours, and it FEELS that running time. You have a filmmaker who considers his own work to be among the best films ever made...and when you watch the film knowing that, you get the sense that Dominik is practically masturbating at the thought of his own visual and artistic genius.
There are ingredients in this film that prove it could've worked splendidly, but instead it was just a sour and bitter pill that might make you think "Hmmm...if only we had a spoonful of sugar".
I admire and hate so much about this film all at once.
So, I will give it a middling rating with some apathy.
RATING: ***/*****
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