Nudie-not-so-Cutie

Film: Blonde
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

I can’t say I went in to Blonde with anything other than trepidation. I’d heard enough about it, and nothing really that good about it, so I watched it mostly out of obligation. I decided to get as many movies as possible watched before the Oscars ceremony tomorrow (I’ll still have a lot to do), and this was the longest one I had left that I have immediate access to. And, aside from the Avatar sequel, it’s the one I didn’t want to watch the most.

I’ll say about Blonde something I said about Elvis. Critic Mark Kermode, in his epic takedown of Sex and the City 2 commented that in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick took us from the birth of the human species to the birth of the next species in 2 hours and 29 minutes, while SatC 2 is 2 hours and 26 minutes and goes essentially nowhere. Blonde is 2:47, nearly three hours.

This is the story of Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean Baker (Ana de Armas, but Vanessa Lemonides for any singing parts) as told, honestly, about as exploitatively as possible. We’re going to start with her as a young child (played in these parts by Lily Fisher) being separated from her mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), who is clearly mentally unstable. We see her transformation into Marilyn during an unpleasant casting couch sequence and then her time as a throuple with Cass Chaplin (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams). We’re also going to get some time with her abusive marriage to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and her tragic marriage to Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody).

And, of course, we’re going to get a number of snippets from her professional career. We’ll see her in some of her roles, both on screen and off-screen. Many of the off-screen parts are going to show her as frantic, worried about perception of her, wanting to be taken seriously as both an actress and someone with a mind, and knowing on some level that it would never happen. And so naturally there is a great deal of tragedy here, but we’re not going to see through anything but the most distorted of lenses.

We’re also going to get a lot of daddy issues. One of the things that will be played up at the beginning is Norma Jean’s feelings of abandonment from her father. Much of her mother’s mental imbalance seems to stem from her feeling abandoned by Norma Jean’s father. And, subsequently, many of Norma Jean’s/Marilyn’s mental instability issues seems to come from the same place. It’s a bit on the nose here—she calls both DiMaggio and Miller “Daddy,” which may or may not be based on fact, but definitely has the effect of infantilizing her.

And, of course, much like the Elvis movie, we’re going to witness the slow descent into drugs and alcohol leading up to the inevitable conclusion. Even if you didn’t know the story, you could see where this was going to go.

There are a few things to talk about here, both in terms of the reason that I watched this and the movie itself. I watched this because on this blog I watch all of the nominees for a number of Oscars, including Best Actress. Ana de Armas is the best part of Blonde, but she is not without some serious issues in the performance. The main one is her accent. She has several scenes where her native Cuban accent isn’t really noticeable, but that’s not always the case—there are a number of scenes where she is clearly speaking with an accent that she is disguising as much as she can, and not very successfully. The problem is that just about everything about Marilyn Monroe is and was iconic, including her voice. She gets the look down pretty well, but the voice doesn’t fit. I like de Armas, but this is “Kevin Costner as Robin Hood” levels of problematic accent. At least she tried.

The movie itself, though, is a trainwreck and a very long trainwreck. At close to three hours long, it feels interminable, and since so much of it is designed to elicit pity for the terrible life situations that Norma Jean is forced into, it’s made to frequently feel tawdry and overtly sexually exploitative, including a scene that essentially shows us an abortion from her uterus. There’s frequent nudity for no reason, for instance. When Joe DiMaggio is going to slap his wife around, there’s no reason for her to be topless except to connect back on a real level to the nudie-cutie/roughie sexploitation films. There’s a lot of this, starting from the casting couch and the rough threesomes and eventually culminates in a blowjob sequence with a guy representing JFK.

It's worth noting that this review is being written and posted literally the day after Blonde received two Razzie awards, one for screenplay and one for Worst Picture. While I haven’t seen all of the other nominees, I can’t say it didn’t earn them. So far, it’s the worst movie I’ve seen this year, and in a year where I watched The Invitation, that’s saying something.

We’ve had better movies about Marilyn. Go watch My Week with Marilyn twice. Twice through is only a little bit longer, and you’ll enjoy it more.

Why to watch Blonde: You can convince yourself it’s a story that needs to be told.
Why not to watch: It’s exploitative in the extreme.