Review: Netflix’s controversial Marilyn Monroe drama Blonde is a precisely constructed nightmare

• Blond
• Directed by Andrew Dominic
• Written by Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates
• With Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale
• classification NC-17; 166 minutes
• Launches in select cinemas 23 Sept; Streaming on Netflix starting September 28th

The Critic’s Choice

Director Andrew Dominik makes achingly beautiful, heartbreaking films (The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, a pair of concert films by Nick Cave). He also intentionally makes ugly, evil (kill her gently, choppers). Blond, the filmmaker’s latest and notoriously long-delayed production, is both. An extraordinarily cynical, metacontextual epic tracing the rise and fall of Marilyn Monroe, Dominik’s film is a deeply uncomfortable and brutal look at America’s most beautiful woman.

Loose adaptation of Joyce Carol Oate’s 2000 novel – which isn’t so much a direct biography of Monroe as more a way for the author to use the actress as a heavy metaphor for all of America’s many cultural ills, a sort of Moby Dick in one Rhinestone Dress – Blond is a precisely constructed nightmare. From Monroe’s childhood to superstardom, Dominik presents her as the passive victim of an endless tragedy: neglect, abuse, heartbreak, addiction. And in the process, Dominik creates a cinematic experience so repulsive that it is destined to be loathed and misunderstood, dismissed as crass and opportunistic, just like those who have benefited from Monroe’s body in their own lives.

But while there are moments – long stretches, actually – when Dominik jumps the distance from criticizing cinema’s exploitability to actively participating, the ultimate effectiveness of Blond cannot be rejected. If you have the patience and courage to engage in the intentionally problematic conversation Dominik is trying to have, then the film’s payoffs are as great as any of Monroe’s on-screen performances.

Shot in a variety of aspect ratios, footages and color schemes, Blond is both a film about an actress and how that actress’ image has been refined, distorted and manipulated by those in power. Famous Monroe moments etched into the brain of collective culture – her dress billowing during the subway grate scene The darn seventh yearher appearance on the red carpet for the premiere of Some like it hot – are transformed here into slow-moving horror shows.

At times the film breaks the Fourth Wall — star Ana de Armas’ voice sometimes switches from the all-American coo of Monroe to the actress’s own Spanish-accented self — and at times confident that there are no walls at all in American pop culture, the Film is as ambitious and alienating as the industry that spears it.

At her best, however, Dominik’s confrontational aesthetic melds perfectly with his cast’s combative performances, beginning with a powerful de Armas that never loses control of her character’s many iterations. But Adrien Brody (who plays Arthur Miller, dubbed “The Playwright” here) and Bobby Cannavale (Joe DiMaggio, or “The Ex-Athlete”) also make surprisingly lasting impressions, with the former finding a disturbing continuous line of delusion in his devotion to Marilyn, the latter pounding the screen with a brutality that is primal, repulsive and unforgettable.

Inevitably, the audience will tiptoe over Blond out of the same salacious curiosity that originally drew moviegoers to Monroe. Namely: What did Dominik do here to get the film the dreaded NC-17 rating in the USA? Turns out, not very much — at least not in the way panting meat hounds would expect. There are two harrowing abortion sequences in the film that use what I would politely call a vaginal point of view, and there is another late-movie scene in which Monroe – weirdly – performs forced oral sex on John F. Kennedy (sorry, “The President”).

These are moments that don’t corrupt young viewers, but justifiably traumatize them. Which of course is Dominik’s intention. Life can be ugly, even – or especially – when it’s caught on camera.

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