Blonde is a “fictional biography” of screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Cuban-born actor Ana de Armas is astonishingly convincing in this uncompromising and tragic take on the American Dream, says Simon Morris.
Australian writer-director Andrew Dominik was actually born in Wellington, New Zealand, but he’s long been international in outlook.
Dominik is best known for his films about American outlaw Jesse James, the Aussie outlaw Chopper and musician Nick Cave which all, among other things, unstitched the idea of celebrity.
As does Blonde.
The story of Marilyn Monroe has been told over and over again as if revisiting the life of the fragile actress whose curse was to embody the American Dream might somehow change the outcome.
Dominik has cast Cuban-born brunette Ana de Armas as the Blonde, and she’s astonishingly convincing.
There are times you can’t tell if it’s Ana on screen or the original footage of Marilyn. And for someone for whom English isn’t even her first language, she gets the voice perfect, too.
Blonde is based on another obsessive work – a vast doorstep of a book by Joyce Carol Oates, described as a “fictional biography” of Monroe.
At its heart, like most of the stories about her, is the question: why was she so unhappy? And could anyone have helped?
Brought up by a troubled solo mother, young Norma-Jeane is constantly told that her missing father is someone important. You don’t need to be Freud to guess “daddy issues” will feature heavily over the next few hours.
With her mother in and out of mental institutions, Norma-Jeane spends most of her childhood in orphanages, before earning a living as a pinup model in trashy magazines.
And then, in this telling, she’s “discovered” – via various Hollywood casting couches – and put in tiny roles in forgettable movies, waiting for the next big break.
What set the newly-named Marilyn apart…. Well, in some ways it’s hard to put your finger on it.
She had some talent – though her commitment to her acting classes is often so total it makes her classmates nervous. It’s like she’s got a mental illness, says one.
She was very pretty, like half the waitresses in Hollywood. But the camera particularly loved her.
Off it, she was one of any number of starlets on contract to Twentieth Century Fox. But on-screen she was suddenly someone else. She was Marilyn Monroe.
Nobody knew how she did it, least of all her.
The movies got better, even if the parts didn’t. Until one day she lucked into some films and directors that knew what to do with her.
When she launched into ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monroe became not just a star but a sensation.
The most beautiful woman on the planet, and First Prize for every alpha male in America.
What distinguishes Blonde from the countless tellings of the Marilyn story is a painstaking visual style.
Director Dominik rounded up over 700 of the most famous Marilyn shots – colour, black and white, film clips – and managed to duplicate most of them by the time the nearly three hours of Blonde is over.
It’s also not afraid to be thoroughly unpleasant and tasteless. Hardly any of the characters are named, though their identities – they are the most famous men in America at the time – is hardly a secret.
But anonymity means Blonde can make these people as bad as it likes, while poor Marilyn has to put up with it.
The unexpected villains of the piece are the Hollywood brat offspring of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G Robinson, who corrupted then discarded her.
It’s scenes like this that have raised the ire of the critics – not so much at Blonde retelling the tragic story again, as telling it in such an ugly way. As if there’s a nice way to tell it.
But frankly, the best way to see Marilyn is in the half-dozen classics she made in the ’50s – like Some Like It Hot (which she hated, incidentally), How to Marry a Millionaire even the notorious Seven Year Itch.
As she often said, that’s the real Marilyn Monroe.
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