Blonde (2022)

A dark meditation on Marilyn Monroe's agonizing slow fall

Blonde (2022)

Streaming on Netflix

Ana De Armas is haunting and radiant as a troubled Marilyn Monroe in Blonde

No longer do we learn of, or watch, movies with anything like innocence.  Today, a movie gets thrown at us before we can get to it.  In our web-driven, wide-streaming, instantly reported, Rotten Tomatoes-reviewed age, we often begin to untangle its “issues” even before we see it.  As we watch, we bring along how the rest of the world has already responded to it.

Or when it comes to Blonde, is the right word endured it?

To talk about this movie, I’m finding it already impossible to begin anywhere other than the scalding reactions to it.   At this point, no one will be able to stream it without having heard about the outrage it’s called up, still cascading through media and the Internet.

It seems most critics and reviewers are appalled by the movie’s explicit scenes of child abuse, drug addiction, heedless sex and a pervasive sadness that seems to overwhelm Marilyn Monroe’s life (1926-1962) from the beginning.

Being undone, caught off guard, tricked, used and abandoned aren’t just themes for this unique movie star’s life, at least according to Andrew Dominik, Blonde’s writer-director.  They’re the keys to understanding Monroe’s death at age 36, an “apparent suicide” according to a coroner’s report.

Dominik adapted his screenplay from the heartbreaking 700-page novel Blonde (2000) by Joyce Carol Oates.  I think the book is a masterpiece, a feminist cry of the heart, and the movie, in its nearly 3-hour running time does the novel ringing, raging justice.

Hopefully you’ll carefully consider what this movie is not about.  It doesn’t set out to burnish Monroe’s legacy.  It isn’t a review of the vagaries, with good and less good movies in the mix, of Monroe’s acting career.   And it’s not a justification for the mistakes Monroe made, or for her own poor judgment.

The real question is, what sort of judge of herself was she able to be?  Sadly, profoundly, say Oates and Dominik, the end is in the beginning.

We see the child Norma Jeane (a terrifyingly perfect performance from Lily Fisher) screamed at, emotionally tormented and at one point nearly drowned in a bathtub by her deeply disturbed mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson, who’s fine in a harsh role).

Abandoned by her mother, she’s dropped off at a childcare institution, where she is reared.  Though she painfully insists “I'm not an orphan,” in effect she is parentless.

We see her (played from here on by the captivating Ana De Armas, who’s riveting throughout) as a young girl of 16 beginning to pose, sometimes in the nude, for magazines, turning her physical endowments into selling points.   Always, there are buyers.

Early in her efforts to land a movie contract, she’s raped by a movie mogul and, like passing an entrance test, that earns her a small part.  As it turns out, it’s the charming Miss Caswell in All About Eve.

Her career is launched with a contract at 20th Century-Fox.  But her body’s curves, the pouted lips and tempting smile – is she beckoning or just saucily waiting? – remain bankable attractions.

Then come the men.  And what “catches” they turn out to be.  For all those complaining that the movie’s Marilyn “lacks agency”, I wonder why they don’t question the “agency” of the men who applied themselves to Monroe as if drilling for oil.

The Ex-Athlete (Bobby Cannavale) is puzzled by his wife (Ana De Armas) in Blonde

Her agency?  What about theirs?  These clever, accomplished, indeed brilliant men couldn’t figure out a weakly educated – but, interestingly, extremely well read, as the years went on – movie star?  Or at least leave her to her own devices?

Those are the questions Oates and Dominik keep pounding at.  And they refuse to let those who knew Monroe, especially the men who took her as their possession, off the hook.   I confess I can’t either.

Adrift, on her own, without a family to support or warn her, young Norma Jeane falls prey to a pair of Hollywood scions who never lived up to the promise of their famous fathers.  Charles Chaplin, Jr. (Xavier Samuel), known as Cass, and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams), called Eddy, are living their hedonistic lives to spite their fathers.

They lure Norma Jeane into a torrid menage where they gleefully exploit her vulnerability, keeping her in service to their pleasures.  But Norma Jeane follows and flatters them, at their mercy but never, they persuade her, their victim.

When she becomes pregnant, they both laughingly make it clear that she needs to get an abortion.  Her extreme emotional pain isn’t of the slightest concern to them.  (Late in Monroe’s life, the pair circle back for a final twist of the knife.)

This is the point in the movie where its detractors really heat up.  Why doesn’t Monroe seem to have any “agency” they keep asking.  All this suffering!  Why are we being put through this?  Didn’t Monroe have a life?  Of course, she had a life and made friends along the way.

But this account focuses on Monroe’s inner life.  There, at the core of Monroe’s lifelong unraveling, those friends, and her “success”, weren’t enough to save her.  Good friends and supporters aside, there were others in her life who saw she’d been damaged and went on to do more damage, increase her pain, weaken her grip on her “agency”.

That was their “agency” at work, and it told them they had every right to take this young woman for all she was worth.

Celebrated men, the movie frees us to ask, what good are they?  Who are they good for?  Whose well-being do they look after?

Monroe, having risen to stardom, meets and is smitten by the Ex-Athlete (Bobby Cannavale), clearly based on Joe DiMaggio (who isn’t named in the script), a baseball “hero”, the word Monroe herself uses to honor him.  He knows full well she’s a beautiful, sexually provocative screen siren.  Being attractive is how she makes her living.  And he declares he “loves” her.

They marry.  But who does he love?  Does he understand who he’s married?  When Cass and Eddy threaten to expose some early nude photos of Monroe, the Ex-Athlete buys the photos, races home and slaps Marilyn down, ordering her to tell the studio to cast her from now on in “serious” roles.

Later, in NYC, when the Ex-Athlete watches her being filmed before a huge crowd as her skirt is lifted by the wind from a subway grate, he can’t bear the sight.  The shooting of that famous scene from The Seven Year Itch (1955) enrages the Ex-Athlete and we see him, when she returns home that night, take a belt to her.

DiMaggio’s brutality toward Monroe has been gossiped about for years.  That’s why those sappy magazine stories about how this obviously deeply insecure man regularly sent roses to her burial crypt have always made me want to vomit.  The lauded baseball “hero” who “loved” her couldn’t keep his trained hands from beating her?  At least the roses didn’t punch her.

Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) consoles his happy/sad wife Marilyn (Ana De Armas) in Blonde

More sappiness plagues Monroe when she marries that towering intellect, playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who’s actually named in the movie, when he was called “The Playwright” in the novel.  They meet at The Actors Studio, where Miller is carrying a sheaf of pages from a play in progress.

Monroe later reads it, and as they discuss it, he’s amazed at her insight into a character he’s created.  Who knew she could think?  But in the course of their marriage, where she suffers three miscarriages, they grow apart.

Miller attends the opening of Some Like It Hot (1959) with Monroe, but already she’s drifted into her own fragile, paranoid state of mind.  Drugs administered by “feel-good” doctors and pills she popped had already contributed to her becoming a screaming harridan on movie sets.

She was past Miller’s help.  Or had he missed earlier chances to get her the support she needed?  I don’t presume to judge.

But before you fall for the weepy, sadly ineffectual, hurting husband Miller has painted himself as, at least consider the following.

In 2004 I attended an event at the 17th Street Barnes & Noble in New York City where Oates, after reading to a rapt crowd from her newest novel The Falls, took questions from the audience about her entire body of work.  I asked how she felt about writing in Blonde about a living person, specifically Arthur Miller (who was still alive in 2004).

She gave an informative response.  Before Blonde was published, Oates said, her publisher’s attorneys wrote Miller inviting him to read the novel’s entire manuscript.  Oates asserted that Miller declined, saying he never read books about Monroe, fiction or nonfiction.

Which of course was his perfect right.  But when he possibly could have affected how he was portrayed, he opted to do nothing.  Was that because he felt he had nothing to hide?  Could be.  But the movie Blonde’s detractors don’t even stop to interrogate Miller as a husband.

Instead, they continue to attack Dominik’s (and Oates’) portrayal of Monroe, saying the writer-director and the novelist are sensationally focused on her misery.

But the movie is about her misery.  That’s a worthy subject all on its own. No permission is required to explore it.  And if Di Maggio, Miller or those two nice guys Jack and Bobby Kennedy deserve defending, are those griping about this movie prepared to do it?

Yes, we finally come to the last man we know of who exploited Monroe’s vulnerability, the manipulative and vainglorious John F. Kennedy, President of the United States.  Kennedy’s dalliances with other women are evoked in a phone call we overhear (is it with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover?) cautioning the commander in chief about his “irresponsible” sexual behavior.

Insisting his private life is no one else’s business, Kennedy, still on the phone, lying in bed, insists that Monroe stop jerking him off, and provide him with what looks like expected oral service.  Monroe does as she’s commanded, and it doesn’t look like it’s the first time.

Her duty completed, she tries to speak to him sympathetically – he is, after all, the most powerful man in the world – and he savagely yanks her head down onto the bed.  In the next scene we see the scars on her face that he’s inflicted.  It’s surely not incidental that his cruelty recalls the beating we’ve seen Norma Jeane’s mother give her.

Without question, she was pummeled, bullied, mocked for being dim-witted (a character trait she adopted for her winsome comic roles), and, perhaps most corrosively, used and tossed away as a convenient symbol of transcendent beauty while also serving as a real-life sex toy, both in one luscious package.

Or was that how she was made to come across in the way she was costumed, directed and yes, complying with her image, behaved on screen?  Did she toy with men’s sexual impulses, or did scripts and directors feature her like an object, and encourage men in their minds to feast on the goodies?  Even if she understood it was a deception, how was she to put a stop to it?

Despite her many achievements and moments of genuine happiness, what Monroe crucially did without, Oates and Dominik argue, is what did her in.  Respect, careful listening and common decency were withheld from her over and over throughout her life, by people who knew or should have known how they could have helped her and refused to do so.

At age 36 she was dead, according to the L.A. County Coroner, an “apparent suicide”.

Public turmoil can sometimes put Marilyn (Ana De Armas) in danger in Blonde

That sad end is this particular narrative’s controlling device.  Indeed, its unapologetic raison d’etre.  A rapturous human life was lost over these 36 years.  Crushed, discounted, belittled, cheapened and left unprotected, indeed viciously exploited.

Before she could figure out the designs others were fashioning on her, it was often too late.  She’d already fallen prey to, and been emotionally disfigured by, her exploiters.  And let’s flip the question:  How many men did Monroe ever exploit, much less destroy?

In the America and Hollywood of Monroe’s time, power between the sexes wasn’t remotely even.  How much that balance has substantially shifted today is precisely the question viewers might well ask at this story’s stark end.

Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin have crafted a brilliant impressionist memory piece, a salute to the vitality Monroe tried to sustain, the prickliness, steel and hope she couldn’t always muster.

We see her light flicker away. Slow fade. That’s the final image they etch on our minds. But the moviemakers clearly don’t want to — can’t quite — let her go.