BLONDE Review: Ana De Armas and her pseudo biopic film

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At the top of the copyright page of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel Blonde is the following statement: “Blonde should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a biography of Marilyn Monroe.” It’s hard to believe
Oates actually believed anyone would pay attention to that line.

Certainly Andrew Dominik’s adaptation doesn’t, judging by his maddeningly reductive yet equally overblown movie that very much wants us to believe this is Marilyn. What’s so infuriating about his Blonde is that he seems to actually think he’s offering unvarnished insight into Norma Jeane’s soul when
instead he’s simply changed the icon into a different kind of icon, just as standardized and onedimensional as a much-replicated Byzantine painting. This is the Marilyn whose Daddy issues are
so all-consuming there’s really nothing else driving her: she is her neuroses, and we as an audience get to gaze at her fragility as well as her semi-naked body, rather too-often.

Ana de Armas’ much-discussed casting turns out to be the film’s only success story and hers is a career making performance, but the vehicle is unworthy. What’s especially frustrating is that Dominik’s terrific The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford sought to demythologize one of the
American West’s most famed figures, and yet with Blonde he does the opposite, treating his subject from one angle only: unstable victim. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, given this is the go-to mode for all pickedover bios of troubled female celebrities who died young – it’s always Marilyn and Diana of
Wales, never James Dean or River Phoenix.

Pre-release hype will be the biggest friend to this mess of a pseudo-biopic that reduces Marilyn Monroe to a disturbed child woman with Daddy issues, never offering a glimpse of the screen magic notwithstanding Ana de Armas’ impressive recreation.