Stuff Digital Edition

Blonde: Marilyn biopic a misfit or big hit?

Graeme Tuckett Blonde is now available to stream on Netflix.

Screenwriter and director Andrew Dominik had Blonde in mind for more than a decade. The film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, a fictional take on Marilyn Monroe’s life that was published in 2000 to great acclaim and some controversy.

Blonde is an immersive and engrossing portrait of, well, someone. Dominik toggles between scenes that are dreamlike and hallucinatory, then adds images that come straight from a nightmare.

But Blonde seldom settles into the expected rhythms of a biopic. If you’ve come to Blonde looking for a ‘‘film about Marilyn Monroe’s life’’ you have come to the wrong place.

This is more slow-burn horror movie than a conventional biopic. Monroe was raped, assaulted, beaten and ripped off throughout her career and her earlier life. As a child, Norma Jeane Mortenson was abandoned by a father she never knew and abused by amother who was always teetering on the edge of a breakdown. She spent more time in orphanages and children’s homes than she did with her mother, Gladys Pearl.

The names may be drawn from history – and many of the incidents are broadly true – but Dominik treats this material as a fever dream, or a Lynchian fantasy. Where real life ends and invention begins is worse than blurred here. It is often treated as irrelevant.

It’s a troubling approach – to go looking for the merely cinematic within all this actual human cruelty and tragedy. But whether Blonde is ultimately as exploitative as the studio executives who preyed on the real Monroe will never be an easily resolved argument.

What Blonde gets right is an emphasis on how intelligent, insightful and flat-out talented Monroe was. Even within the confines of the roles she was offered, Monroe blazed with smart choices and she carved some indelible characterisations out of some average scripts.

We will never know how much of her very best work was left on the editor’s floor because those shots didn’t match the studio’s idea of what the public wanted.

If she had been born a decade later, or had been surrounded by better people, it is heartbreaking to speculate on the actress and the person that Monroe could have become.

In the lead role, and in nearly every shot, Ana de Armas is just as good as the trailer and publicity suggest. She vanishes into the role – or roles. The line between Norma Jeane and the Marilyn she played is a constant theme of Blonde. De Armas is convincing – and often devastating – as both. It’s a long way off, but an Oscar nomination seems a certainty.

Around de Armas, Bobby Cannavale as husband No 2, Joe DiMaggio, is especially effective, playing an eventually tyrannical and abusive man as a figure lost in his own fame and incapable of dealing with its absence.

Blonde is exceptionally well crafted and assembled. Technically it is superb and the performances are uniformly wonderful.

Yet I still got to the end of the 166 minutes wishing they hadn’t bothered, or at least that they had stuck to the truth. That could have yielded a more admirable film than this.

Front Page

en-nz

2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-30T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282522957346405

Stuff Limited