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“Blonde” abuses and exploits Marilyn Monroe all over again, the way so many men did over the cultural icon’s tragic, too-short life. Maybe that’s the point, but it creates a maddening paradox: condemning the cruelty the superstar endured until her death at 36 while also reveling in it.

And yet writer/director Andrew Dominik ’s film, based on the fictional novel by Joyce Carol Oates , remains technically impeccable throughout, even though it feels like an overlong odyssey at nearly three hours. The craftsmanship on display presents another conundrum: “Blonde” is riveting, even mesmerizing, but eventually you’ll want to turn your eyes away as this lurid display becomes just too much. My personal breaking point was a POV shot from inside Marilyn’s vagina as she was having a forced abortion performed on her. A lengthy, extreme close-up of a drugged-up Monroe fellating President Kennedy while he’s on the phone in a hotel room also feels gratuitous and is probably why the film has earned a rare NC-17 rating.

Did any of this really happen? Maybe. Maybe not. What you have to understand from the start is that “Blonde” is an exploration of the idea of Marilyn Monroe. It’s as much a biopic of the film star as “ Elvis ” is a biopic of Elvis Presley . It touches on a series of actual, factual events as a road map, from her movies to her marriages. But ultimately, it’s a fantasia of fame, which increasingly becomes a hellscape. That’s more exciting than the typical biography that plays the greatest hits of a celebrity’s life in formulaic fashion, and “Blonde” is consistently inventive as it toys with both tone and form. By the end, though, this approach feels overwhelming and even a little dreary.  

As Marilyn Monroe—or her real name of Norma Jeane, as she’s mostly called in the film— Ana de Armas is asked to cry. A lot. Sometimes it’s a light tear or two as she draws from her traumatic childhood for an acting class exercise. Usually, it’s heaving sobs as the cumulative weight of mental illness and addiction takes its toll. When she’s not crying, she’s naked. Frequently, she’s both, as well as bloody. And in nearly every situation, she’s either a pawn or a victim, a fragile angel searching for a father figure to love and protect her.

Certainly, some of this is accurate—the way Hollywood power brokers regarded her as a pretty face and a great ass when she wanted them to consider her a serious actress and love her for her soul. De Armas gives it her all in every moment; she’s so captivating, so startling, that you long for the part to provide her the opportunity to show more of Marilyn’s depth, to dig deeper than the familiar cliches. She’s doing the breathy, girlish voice, but not perfectly—traces of her Cuban accent are unmistakable—and that’s OK given the film’s unorthodox approach. More importantly, she captures Monroe’s spirit, and often looks uncannily like her. Following standout supporting turns in movies like “ Knives Out ” and “ No Time to Die ,” as well as the delicious trash that was “ Deep Water ,” here is finally the meaty, leading role that showcases all she can do. She’s so good that she makes you wish the role rose to her level.

“Blonde” is a fever dream from the very start. Working with cinematographer Chayse Irivn (“ BlacKkKlansman ,” Beyonce’s “Lemonade”) and frequent musical collaborators Nick Cave and Warren Ellis , Dominik sets the scene with impressionistic wisps of sight and sound. Shadows and ethereal snippets of score mix with ash from a fire in the Hollywood hills blowing through the night sky. The phone rings loudly. The camera swish pans to the left. We’re immediately on edge. It’s Los Angeles 1933, and young Norma Jeane (a poised and heartbreaking Lily Fisher ) is enduring horrific physical and emotional abuse from her volatile and hyperverbal mother (a haunting Julianne Nicholson , always great).

Dominik (“ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ”) proclaims his restless style from the beginning—jumping around not just in time, but from high-contrast black and white to rich Technicolor and in between various aspect ratios. Sometimes, the color palette is faded, as if we’re looking at Marilyn in a long-ago photograph. Sometimes, the sound design is muted—as in her classic performance of “I Wanna Be Loved by You” from “ Some Like It Hot ”—to indicate the confusion of her inner state. It’s all thrilling for a while, and de Armas strikes a magnetic figure as the young Marilyn in both her vulnerability and her ambition.

An imagined three-way romance with Charlie Chaplin Jr. ( Xavier Samuel ) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. ( Evan Williams ) brings a welcome vibe of fun and frolic; they’re both beautiful and flirtatious, smoldering and seductive. And it becomes clear as the movie progresses that they’re the only men who loved her for her true self as Norma Jeane while also appreciating the beguiling artifice of Marilyn. This relationship also teaches Norma Jeane to lose herself in the mirror in order to find the famous persona she’ll present to the outside world: “There she is, your magic friend,” “Cass” Chaplin purrs as he caresses her from behind. And Dominik will return to that image of Norma Jeane beseeching her own reflection as a means of conjuring strength. The character’s stark duality gives de Armas plenty of room to show off her impressive range and precise technique.

But too much of “Blonde” is about men chewing Marilyn up and spitting her back out. A studio executive known only as “Mr. Z”—presumably as in Zanuck—rapes her when she visits his office about a part. New York Yankees legend Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ) seems like a decent and tender husband until he turns controlling and violent. Her next husband, playwright Arthur Miller (an understated Adrien Brody ), is patient and kind yet emotionally detached—but by the time Marilyn is married to him, anxiety, booze and pills have wrecked her so significantly that no one could have helped.

She calls these men “Daddy” in the hope that they’ll function in place of the father she never knew but desperately craved, but in the end, everyone lets her down. And “Blonde” does, too, as it strands de Armas in a third-act sea of hysteria. As for the film’s many graphic moments—including one from the perspective of an airplane toilet, as if Marilyn is puking up pills and champagne directly on us—one wonders what the point is. Merely to shock? To show the extent to which the Hollywood machinery commodified her? That’s nothing new.

“Blonde” is actually more powerful in its gentler interludes—when Marilyn and Arthur Miller are teasingly chasing each other on the beach, for example, hugging and kissing in the golden, shimmering sunlight. “Am I your good girl, Daddy?” she asks him sweetly, seeking his approval. But of course, she can’t be happy here, either. All her joyous times are tinged with sadness because we know how this story ends.

More often, Dominik seems interested in scenes like the garish slow-motion of the “Some Like It Hot” premiere, where hordes of ravenous men line the sidewalks for Marilyn’s arrival, frantically chanting her name, their eyes and mouths distorted to giant, frightening effect as if they wish to devour her whole. He similarly lingers in his depiction of the famous subway grate moment from “The Seven Year Itch,” with Marilyn’s ivory halter dress billowing up around her as she giggles and smiles for the crowds and cameras. (The costume design from Jennifer Johnson is spectacularly on-point throughout, from her famous gowns to simple sweaters and capri pants.) We see it in black-and-white and color, in slow-motion and regular speed, from every imaginable angle, over and over again.

After a while, it becomes so repetitive that this iconic, pop culture moment grows numbing, and we grow weary of the spectacle. Maybe that’s Dominik’s point after all. But we shouldn’t be.

In limited theatrical release tomorrow. On Netflix on September 23rd.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

Blonde (2022)

Rated NC-17 for some sexual content.

166 minutes

Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane

Adrien Brody as The Playwright

Bobby Cannavale as The Ex-Athlete

Garret Dillahunt

Sara Paxton as Miss Flynn

Lucy DeVito

Julianne Nicholson as Gladys

Scoot McNairy

Xavier Samuel as Cass Chaplin

Caspar Phillipson as The President

Evan Williams as Eddy G. Robinson Jr.

Rebecca Wisocky as Yvet

Toby Huss as Whitey

Catherine Dent as Jean

Haley Webb as Brooke

Eden Riegel as Esther

Spencer Garrett as President's Pimp

Tygh Runyan as Father

David Warshofsky as Mr. Z

Lily Fisher as Young Norma Jeane

Michael Masini as Tony Curtis

Chris Lemmon

Ned Bellamy as Doc Fell

Sonny Valicenti as Casting Director

Colleen Foy as Pat

Brian Konowal

Tatum Shank as Dick Tracy

Andrew Thacher as Jiggs

Dominic Leeder as Bugs Bunny

Lidia Sabljic as Sweet Sue

Isabel Dresden as Doc Fell's Nurse

Skip Pipo as Dr. Bender

Tyler Bruhn as NYC Acting Student

Ravil Isyanov as Billy Wilder

Tim Ransom as Rudy

Judy Kain as Severe Woman

Time Winters as George Sanders

Rob Brownstein as The Acting Coach

Danielle Jane Darling as L.a. Actor #3

Mia McGovern Zaini as Young Norma Jeane

Rob Nagle as Radio Announcer

Emil Beheshti as Brentwood Doctor

Jeremy Shouldis as Tuxedo #2

Ethan Cohn as Assistant to the Director

Steve Bannos as Brentwood Doctor

Mike Ostroski as The Writer

Danielle Lima as Swimsuit Model

Christopher Kriesa as Joe E. Brown

Eric Matheny as Joseph Cotten

Jerry Hauck as Tuxedo #1

Scott Hislop as Marilyn Dancer

Dieterich Gray as Photographer's Assistant

Kiva Jump as Ward Nurse at Norwalk

Patrick Brennan as Joe

Chris Moss as Dancer

Ryan Vincent as Uncle Clive

Brian Konowal as Pissing Man

• Andrew Dominik

Writer (novel)

• Joyce Carol Oates

Cinematographer

• Chayse Irvin
• Adam Robinson
• Warren Ellis

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‘blonde’ review: ana de armas’ haunted marilyn monroe drowns in the excesses of andrew dominik’s woozy reflection on celebrity.

Adrien Brody plays Arthur Miller and Bobby Cannavale is Joe DiMaggio in this Netflix adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel fusing fact and fiction, premiering in the Venice competition.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The nagging feeling arises that in the rumored struggle between Netflix and Dominik to chisel the long-gestating project down to size, it might have benefited everyone had the director not prevailed. This is a work of such wild excesses and questionable cruelty that it leaves you wondering how many more times and in how many more creative ways are we going to keep torturing, degrading and killing this abused woman.

To get one point out of the way, the vultures who seized upon an early teaser trailer to attack the lack of authenticity in Cuban actress de Armas playing Monroe need to back off. Any quibbles about accent are beside the point, especially since her voice work is more than creditable enough. This is a freewheeling fever-dream interpretation of an iconic Hollywood creation, not a slavish facsimile.

De Armas is creating a character just as Dominik’s script has Norma Jeane create a character — in the latter case as an Actors Studio exercise, drawing a circle of light that contains an alternate self to be carried with her wherever she goes. That motif gets a bit overworked as Marilyn interrogates herself about which one of them is real, though that’s no fault of the very game de Armas.

Just in case it wasn’t sleazy enough, Dominik has Marilyn delivered and removed from the unnamed president’s hotel suite like a sack of meat by secret service agents; she’s alarmed but barely conscious following a cross-country flight zonked out on pills and champagne. Without even a hello, the Pres then motions her to get busy on his penis while he’s stuck on a call about sexual misconduct allegations. “Don’t let me throw up,” she thinks. You might feel the same.

The opening wastes no time setting up the psychological through-line of the absent father figure. On her birthday, the young Norma Jeane’s unbalanced mother (Julianne Nicholson) drags her into the bedroom where she slept in a drawer as a baby and points to a framed photo on the wall, telling the child her father is a Hollywood big shot whose identity must be kept under wraps. Her mother also makes it clear Norma Jeane was unwanted, at one point attempting to drown her in the bathtub. The girl is offloaded onto neighbors when her mother is hospitalized, eventually winding up in an orphanage.

Her teen years and early 20s are a montage of magazine shoots and pinups, including calendar nudes. Monroe’s early film experiences are conflated, making her first screen role her brief but memorable appearance in All About Eve , a part secured by submitting to rape in the office of Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck (David Warshofsky).

Here and elsewhere, clips from films including Niagara , The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot are integrated by editor Adam Robinson into a collage-like visual approach that switches somewhat randomly between B&W and color and between shifting aspect ratios.

One of Oates’ most bizarre fictional detours is a threeway relationship with Cass (Xavier Samuels) and Eddie (Evan Williams), the jaded offspring of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively. Both describe themselves as the sons of men who never wanted them, establishing an affinity with Marilyn, not that it’s played for poignancy.

Dominik instead presents their sexually charged interlude like a Herb Ritts photo shoot, landing Marilyn on tabloid covers and on an operating table for a studio-arranged abortion just as her career is taking off. That ordeal also prompts the introduction of a fetus-cam, an unfortunate device used to explore her unfulfilled longing for a child in the least subtle way possible.

Later, she’s repulsed while watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , launching into an inner monologue with her unborn child: “You killed your baby for this?” she asks. “That thing up on the screen, it’s not you.” The script’s overly simplistic Freudian personality split is only marginally less obvious than the reproachful voice that keeps piping up from the womb. Yeesh.

Much of this is fairly standard hell-of-celebrity observation, seldom far from cliché, albeit with the seductive imagery of a gifted visual storyteller. (Dominik works here with DP Chayse Irvin, best known for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Beyoncé’s Lemonade .) The film actually becomes more emotionally engaging when it lingers over straight biographical chapters.

Those include Marilyn’s stormy marriage to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ), identified as “the former athlete,” who’s uncomfortable with her fame far eclipsing his. He loses his cool and gets violent over the Seven Year Itch subway-grate scene, when delighted crowds gather to watch cameras capture her skirt blowing up in the breeze.

Better yet is Marilyn’s flight from the pressures of Hollywood in the mid 1950s, seeking refuge in New York theater, where she meets “The Playwright,” Arthur Miller ( Adrien Brody , the best of the supporting cast). It’s here that Dominik briefly pays attention to the vulnerable human being at the center of the hallucinatory, hypersexualized circus. Miller becomes for a time one of the few men called “Daddy” who acknowledges that she has a brain, and their time away from the spotlight in Connecticut represents a reprieve in her life. But a miscarriage pushes her over the edge again.

While he skips the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death, Dominik dips into the surveillance period when her dalliances with the Kennedys put her on the national security radar. But like most everything else in Blonde , the writer-director plays with the lines separating truth from paranoia, reality from addled nightmare. The nerve-jangling sounds of phones cranked up to high volume and the constant haze of semi-consciousness push the film into sensationalized psychosexual trauma porn, steadily robbing the protagonist of all dignity.

The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.

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The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives.

• Andrew Dominik
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Ana de Armas
• Lily Fisher
• Julianne Nicholson
• 1.1K User reviews
• 496 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore
• 12 wins & 35 nominations total

• Norma Jeane

• Young Norma Jeane

• Norma Jeane's Father

• Deputy Will Bonnie

• Uncle Clive

• Marilyn Singing Voice

• Joe (Photo Shoot Photographer)

• Acting Coach

• Eddy Robinson Jr.

• Cass Chaplin

• Casting Director

• Assistant to Director

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia This film is based on the 2000 novel "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates , which is a fictionalized account inspired by the life of Marilyn Monroe , not an actual biography. Oates insisted that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. Oates said that she didn't have anything to do with the making of this film, though once in a while, director Andrew Dominik would get in contact with her, and that she was given an almost-final cut in 2020 and she has praised the film ever since. The novel had been previously adapted into a two-part miniseries: Blonde (2001) , starring Poppy Montgomery as Monroe.
• Goofs Marilyn greets the Secret Service agents at her door with: "You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa ?" Mother Teresa had not gained international recognition in 1962. It's highly doubtful Marilyn would have known who she was.

Norma Jeane : Marilyn doesn't exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jeane. I'm still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.

• Connections Featured in How Fight Scene Props Are Made for Movies & TV (2022)
• Soundtracks Ev'ry Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy Written by Lester Lee and Allan Roberts

User reviews 1.1K

• arungeorge13
• Sep 28, 2022
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• September 28, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Netflix
• Los Angeles Theatre - 615 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" premiere)
• Plan B Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $22,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 47 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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Blonde Reviews

It’s a literal descent through madness, brought on by a system and society that builds up individuals only to spit them out the other side.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Oct 31, 2023

Ana de Armas is scintillating in a film that tells the story of pop-culture icon Marilyn Monroe, but Blonde hardly explores who Norma Jeane truly is behind her on-screen avatar.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

ll the technical elements are remarkable, from cinematography to production design and score. But that the film works at all is down to the extraordinary performance at the heart of it: Ana de Armas carries the film squarely on her shoulders.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

Blonde has a problem separating the truth from fiction. It is marred with nightmare sequences close to paranoia rather than reality.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

For all that the film works on a technical level, on a performance level and on a visceral level, it is, frankly, far too one-note and far too... empty to justify its quite punishing 167-minute run time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 31, 2023

Blonde’s near-obsession with showing varied abuses of Norma serves no purpose other than to exploit the actual traumas of this young woman.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

"There’s an overall dismissiveness towards both Monroe and Oates’s complex and infuriating novel that makes the film sit uneasily."

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 28, 2023

Director Andrew Dominik's use of dramatic jumps in time, blending of color and black-and-white sequences, and a deranged screenplay at the heart of it all makes Blonde less of a biopic and more of a self-indulgent fable.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Displaying the tragedy of Marilynn Monroe. In some ways a horror movie & others a slog of a film that never really finds its footing. Ana De Armas is incredible & the cinematography is mesmerizing but I never found myself fully engaged

Marilyn’s ghost was haunting Ana de Armas for a reason.

[Blonde will] not only send you down the rabbit hole of stories circling Monroe and get you to watch her films but also make you wonder about the entertainment industry and the media-consuming populace.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2023

It puts the audience in a Twilight Zone-esque state for almost three hours, where you can’t escape or tune off.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 19, 2023

The cruelty seems to be the point of "Blonde," which makes a meandering three-hour movie a tough sell.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 16, 2023

"Blonde" is too caught up in its creator’s notion of Norma Jeane, forgetting there was also a person underneath who sometimes functioned and who gave us indelible performances that touched something beyond carnality.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

Ultimately, it's de Armas who makes Blonde palatable through the rough spots. From one angle, she's made up to be the spitting image of Ms. Monroe, at least the way she looked on the red carpet or when she was ready for her close-up.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

By then it is impossible to tell if the confused Dominik is attacking masculinity, Hollywood, and America, or if the film is a howl of revulsion at the existence of women.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

As it stands everything was done for style, for the look of it, to exist as a living reel of Dominick’s talents. None of it serves to show Marilyn as anything more than a victim.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 15, 2023

It's an O.K. movie, despite its faults, but I think I would have rather seen more of the real Norma Jeane and less of the sad, exploited victim.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Feb 1, 2023

Straight masterpiece. Ana de Armas is uncanny in her fearless portrayal of Hollywood's most iconic actress. Feminist think piece. You bet. This is Cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: FIVE STARS | Jan 30, 2023

If BLONDE is an exercise, it's an exercise in aesthetic. It craves the façade. It needs it. The moment truth enters the equation is the moment everything falls apart, so [Dominik] avoids it like the plague.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 13, 2023

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‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake

She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her mind.

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By Manohla Dargis

Given all the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured during her 36 years — her family tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster homes, spells of poverty, unworthy film roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering attention of insatiable fans — it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities of “Blonde,” the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.

Hollywood has always eaten its own, including its dead. Given that the industry has also always loved making movies about its own machinery, it’s no surprise that it also likes making movies about its victims and martyrs. Three years ago in the biopic “Judy,” Renée Zellweger played Judy Garland near the end of her troubled life. “Blonde” goes for a more comprehensive biopic sweep — it runs nearly three hours — embracing a bleakly familiar trajectory that begins with Monroe’s unhappy childhood, revisits her dazzling yet progressively fraught fame, her depressingly abusive relationships, myriad health issues and catastrophic downward spiral.

After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Childhood is a horror show — Gladys is cold, violent — but Norma Jeane crawls into adulthood (a fine if overwhelmed Ana de Armas). She models for cheesecake magazines, and before long breaks into the film industry, which is another nightmare. Soon after she steps onto a lot, she is raped by a man, here called Mr. Z and seemingly based on Darryl F. Zanuck, the longtime head of 20th Century Fox studio, where Monroe became a star.

“Blonde” is based on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates hefty (the original hardback is 738 pages) fictionalized account of Monroe’s life. In the novel, Oates draws from the historical record but likewise plays with facts. She cooks up a ménage a trois for Monroe and channels her ostensible thoughts, including during a lurid tryst with an unkind President John F. Kennedy. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.”

The writer-director of “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik, doesn’t seem to have read that part about Monroe. His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years pass and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Prey for leering men and a curiosity for smirking women (unlike Monroe, this Marilyn has no women friends), she is aware of her effect on others but also helpless to do, well, anything. With her tremulous smile, she drifts and stumbles through a life that never feels like her own.

All that’s missing from this portrait is, well, everything else, including Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in — and knowledge of — politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace?

Fictionalized histories play with the truth, hence the hedges that filmmakers stick on movies, that they’re “inspired by” or “based on” the truth. “Blonde” doesn’t announce itself as fiction right off, though it carries the usual mealy-mouthed disclaimer in the credits. But of course this is all about Monroe, one of the most famous women of the 20th century, and it revisits her fame and life — Bobby Cannavale plays a character based on Joe DiMaggio, and Adrien Brody on Arthur Miller — with enough fidelity to suggest that Dominik is working in good faith when he’s simply exploiting her anew.

That the first image of Marilyn in “Blonde” is of her ass makes that clear. The movie opens with a short black-and-white sequence that re-creates the night Monroe filmed the most famous scene in Billy Wilder’s garish 1955 comedy, “The Seven Year Itch,” about a married man lusting after a neighbor played by Monroe. During the film, her character stands on a subway grating and coos as a gust of air twice whooshes up her pleated white dress, exposing her thighs. “The Seven Year Itch” only bares her legs, although apparently the massive crowd that watched the scene while it was being shot saw more.

As camera flash bulbs pop, flooding the screen white, Dominik shows some fleeting images of the crowd and then cuts to Marilyn as her dress billows. Her back is to the camera — the framing of the shot lops off most of her head and legs — and she’s leaning a bit forward, so that her butt is thrust toward the viewer, as if in invitation. Dominik does get around to showing her face, which is beaming as the camera points up toward Marilyn in outward supplication. The high-contrast of the images makes the color black seem bottomless (metaphor alert!) while the white is so bright that it threatens to blot her out.

For the rest of “Blonde,” Dominik keeps peeping up Marilyn’s dress, metaphorically and not, while he tries to make his filmmaking fit his subject: He uses different aspect ratios and switches between color and black-and-white (she made films in both); reproduces some of the most indelible photos of her; and now and again employs some digital wizardry, as when a bed she’s sharing with two lovers during a vigorous romp turns into a waterfall, which happens around the time Marilyn makes “Niagara.” In other words, again and again, Dominik blurs the line between her films and her life.

But by so insistently erasing the divide between these realms, Dominik ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique. There’s no there there to his Marilyn, just tears and trauma and sex, lots and lots of sex. It’s a baffling take, though particularly when he takes us inside Marilyn’s vagina — twice (!), once in color and once in black-and-white — while she’s having abortions. I’m still not sure if this is meant to represent the point of view of her cervix or fetuses, who also make appearances . It certainly isn’t Marilyn’s.

Dominik is so far up Marilyn Monroe’s vagina in “Blonde” that he can’t see the rest of her. It’s easy to dismiss the movie as arty trash; undoubtedly it’s a missed opportunity. Monroe’s life was tough, but there was more to it than Dominik grasps, the proof of which is in the films she left behind — “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “How to Marry a Millionaire,” “Some Like It Hot,” “The Misfits” — the whole damn filmography. To judge from “Blonde,” her performances were shaped by her agonies and somehow happened by chance, by fate, or because she’s a mystical, magical sex bomb. That’s grotesque, and it’s wrong. But if Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.

Blonde Rated NC-17 for sex, nudity and substance abuse. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix .

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Blonde movie reviews: What are the critics saying about Netflix’s Blonde?

By diana nosa | sep 29, 2022.

After months of anticipation, Netflix has finally released  Blonde , the stunning biopic about the life of the late Marilyn Monroe.

From Kim Kardashian wearing Monroe’s infamous John F. Kennedy birthday dress to this year marking the 60th anniversary of the icon’s heartbreaking death, some believe the 2022 film could not have come at a better time, as it is very important to know all about the legacy of Marilyn Monroe.

However, there are those who believe that the film shouldn’t have been created at all, especially because there are many other ways to honor Monroe’s life other than making a biopic. Nevertheless, the Netflix film is here, and so are the many reviews and ratings of the 2022 film.

Did  Blonde  do Marilyn Monroe justice, or is this film yet another exploitative title that should be tossed into the sea of forgetfulness? Here’s the verdict.

How critics feel about Blonde

As we stated before, there are some who are all for this new biopic and there are those who couldn’t be anymore against it. This could explain why, as of today,  Blonde  is receiving mixed reviews and ratings.

Rohan Naahar of The Indian Express praises director Andrew Dominik’s choice to depict the most traumatizing aspects of Monroe’s life in a way that highlights her humanity as opposed to giving her abusers the spotlight.

"“But this isn’t an exploitative movie,” Naahar states. “The perspective never shifts from Marilyn; the film never leaves her side. In moments that could be perceived as dehumanising, Dominik’s camera trains its focus on Marilyn’s face. He isn’t going to dignify the abuse by showing it on screen; he’s concerned only about what Marilyn is feeling, as he implores viewers to lock eyes with her and stay until the end.”"

Austin Chronicle ‘s Jenny Nulf also felt that  Blonde  did a stellar job at removing the rose-colored glasses we often have when remembering Monroe’s fame, stating:

"“Marilyn Monroe was every American’s fantasy – a desirable beauty with a sublime balance of sex appeal and approachability, a ‘cool girl’ of her time. Blonde seeks to destroy that perfect pinup and topple the pristine myth of Monroe’s celebrity.”"

Though the film was able to do Marilyn Monroe’s trials and tribulations justice without glamorizing her trauma, in many ways, some feel that this feat simply wasn’t enough to overshadow the otherwise “hollow” film.

Screenrant ‘s Mae Abdulbaki gave the film two out of five stars because it failed to show anything other than Marilyn Monroe’s pain and struggles. Like many, Abdulbaki believes that Monroe’s trauma wasn’t why she is noted as a Hollywood legend.

"“And while Blonde is uplifted by a passionate performance by Ana de Armas, it isn’t interested in the life of Norma Jeane Mortensen so much as it is in the pain and suffering she faced,” Abdulbaki expresses. “If anything, Blonde is a tedious, hollow, one-note take on a woman who was so much more than her trauma.”"

In considering both sides, it’s easy to understand why some are withholding from streaming  Blonde . But here’s the bottom line.

Should I stream or skip Blonde?

In our humble opinion, if you’re watching  Blonde  because you wish to be entertained with a new Netflix release , then we believe you should 100% stream the film. Ana de Armas’s performance is extremely captivating and moving. So much so that you may be entranced by the actress at several points in the movie.

The acting and aesthetics of  Blonde  are more than enough to appease your wish to be thoroughly enthralled by the 2022 title. However, we believe being entertained is the only feeling you may receive.

If you are opting to watch  Blonde  because you desire to know more about Marilyn Monroe, mainly about many her awe-inspiring impact on feminism and body positivity, then this is not the film for you.

As the aforementioned reviewers touched on,  Blonde  puts an immense amount of focus on the low points of Monroe’s life. And while Dominik’s choice does serve to remind us that the superstar was a human underneath all the diamonds, it takes away from the important revelation that Marilyn Monroe was a survivor that went on to do many, many great things in spite of her dark past.

Monroe loved giving to those in need. She loved speaking out against injustice ; she loved fighting for other remarkable women, such as Ella Fitzgerald, to have a seat at the Hollywood table. She loved being a conqueror, and, unfortunately,  Blonde  didn’t capture too many of her greatest achievements.

Next. Netflix Blonde cast guide: Who stars in the Marilyn Monroe movie?. dark

Perhaps you’ll have a different opinion on the matter. The only way to find out is to stream  Blonde today on Netflix .

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‘Blonde’ Review: Andrew Dominik’s Miserable Marilyn Monroe Portrait Only Further Tarnishes the Star

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Images of Marilyn Monroe are the most replicated of any actress to emerge since the dawn of cinema. Her peroxide curls, cupid’s bow pout, and va-va-voom figure are recognizable to the point that her marketing potential has long since overwhelmed the matter of who she was as a person. To take a swing at saying — or showing —  something resonant about the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson, a storyteller would have to go to lengths far greater than Andrew Dominik is able to span in his bizarre, miserabilist biopic.

Much like Asaf Kapadia did with his documentary, “Amy,” Dominik critiques the world for reducing his subject down to her topline assets — and then treats her in exactly the same way. His Marilyn is a sexy, breathy blonde with daddy issues. And that’s all, folks.

Well, not quite all, as “Blonde” sets out to show a lifetime of victimization and exploitation. The film is Dominik’s finger pointed at everyone who had a hand traumatizing his leading lady, from her mother trying to drown her in the bath aged 7 to her death from an overdose of barbiturates at 36 after being used and abused by the Hollywood machine.

Drawing from Joyce Carol Oates’ impressionistic “fictionalized” novel of the same name, Dominik brings to life chronological snapshots of the worst moments in Monroe’s life, focusing on the yearning she felt as result of having an absent father and a mentally ill mother, the pregnancies that never led to babies, and the violence and cruelty she suffered at the hands of powerful men. It’s safe to say Dominik will not receive a Christmas card from either the JFK or the Joe DiMaggio estate this year.

Star Ana de Armas ’ uncanny resemblance to Marilyn takes the film a long way. If Dominik had thought as much about actually interpreting his character opposed to resurrecting her physically, “Blonde” could have a tour de force. Famous archive photographs of Marilyn wearing a black turtleneck and cropped trousers, a white dress with a plunging neckline, and even when she cheerfully posed naked are amongst the painstakingly recreated looks given locomotion by De Armas with the help of blue contact lenses and a wig. (Gary Archer is credited for dental prosthetics, suggesting just how far measures were taken to create the eerie doppelgänger, all the way into her mouth.)

The film is obsessed with Monroe’s wide-eyed beauty, and it is apt to capture the quality that enabled Norma to become Marilyn, giving her a passport out of poverty and, on the flip-side, luring in predators of all descriptions. Yet, close-up after close-up after close-up eventually starts to feel less like a knowing nod to her powers, and more like the director trying to have his cake and eat it.

DOP Chayse Irvin does powerful work when the script allows him to capture something other than feminine charms. One early tableau from Norma’s childhood features her mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson) in the background, framed through a latticed door as she plays the piano while, in the foreground, a faded poster of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” flaps on the wall. Shortly afterwards a fire rages throughout the neighborhood. Little Norma and Gladys drive through the flames, while the “HOLLYWOOD” sign sits in the horizon, untouched by the carnage, symbolizing the possibility of something better.

As interpreted through Dominik (who also adapted the screenplay himself), Norma will never reach that something better, not even for a second. He defines her strictly through what she does not have — direction, love, a dad — resulting in a gaping lack to De Armas’ earnestly committed performance; she is playing a character with no autonomy. Her task — which she carries off beautifully, tearfully, and often toplessly — is to show the wounds inflicted on her, like sentient memory foam.

“Like watching a mental patient. Not acting. Not technique,” comments one member of the production after the then-unknown Marilyn’s emotional audition for “Don’t Bother To Knock” (1952). Dominik never presents an alternate account for his leading lady’s acting prowess, nor salutes her own role in her image creation. Her time as a diligent student with Lee Strasberg is reduced down to an oft-flashed back to black-and-white sequence of Marilyn and other students repeating a line about “carrying a circle of light.” He presents her as someone for whom acting was an innate untutored gift, rather than as a student intent on mastering her craft. She is a savant, a babe in the woods, a Balthazar the donkey with ass to spare.

A motif running through “Blonde” is the distinction between Norma, who is real, and Marilyn, who is not. Norma is clear that she is not Marilyn and craves male companions who see beyond the sex symbol alter-ego that she slips on and off. As her career is taking off, she falls into a menage a trois with rakish dissolutes, Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) for what will prove the high watermark of her relationships with men.

All three are beautiful people who share a pervasive sadness as a result of being abandoned. Per EGR, “We’re the juniors of men who never wanted us.” All do their utmost to sublimate sorrow through the pleasures of the flesh. One fabulous transition involves an orgasming Norma, head thrown back, clasping at a bed that becomes waterfalls overlaid by the title cards for “Niagara.” The phrase, “A RAGING TORRENT OF EMOTION,” fills the cinema screen as Norma watches nervously in the audience.

Dominik’s visual flourishes are not always as successful. There has been early hype about the “womb camera” as we see the world from the POV of an unborn baby. This, at least, has the merit of being camp. More tedious is the over-reliance on slow-motion shots of Marilyn overwhelmed by crowds of snarling paparazzi to the sound of camera bulbs flashing. Dominik really wants to put across that she was oppressed through both force and neglect, and over-uses flashbacks to both a sexual assault and a photograph of the man her mum presented as her dad. A relentless sound design by the usually exquisite Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is misjudged, steamrolling through a film that already lacks nuance.

As Norma becomes increasingly troubled and fearful of ending up like her mother, hope is kept alive by letters that sporadically arrive from a man who signs off as her “tearful daddy.” He dangles the possibility of their meeting without ever committing to a date. These letters move her more than her marriage to either an abusive Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) or a gentile Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), much older men whom she addresses as “Daddy” in an act of Technicolor displacement. The Miller marriage is the only other reprieve presented in her sprint towards the grave, and Brody delivers a gentle intellectualism that feels like a port in a storm.

It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim. To watch any of her movies is to feast on a luminous performer whose intelligence is sublimated beneath a knowingly hypnotic physical affect. Her legacy is still best preserved through her talents, rather than through a film that might as well be another face printed by Andy Warhol’s factory — an X-rayed version, so that instead of bright pop art colors, the stencil is simply of a skull.

“Blonde” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on Friday, September 16 and on its streaming platform on  Wednesday, September 28.

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Blonde Is Garish, Unfair, and No Fun At All

Ana de Armas's screen glories will come. They aren't here.

Not one of the directors who provided the roles that brought out her incandescence, what George Cukor called “her absolutely unerring sense of comedy,” or the others who, in Don’t Bother to Knock and especially in the astounding Niagara found something hard, dark, mean? Not any of the photographers, male and female, who, creating some of the most indelible images of the 20th Century, often spoke of her more as a collaborator than as a camera subject? Not Whitey Snyder, the loyal friend who did her makeup from her first screen test at Twentieth Century Fox in 1946 to her funeral in 1962? Not any of her husbands in any private moment? Not Arthur Miller’s father, who Marilyn called every week even after her divorce from his son? Not one of the moviegoers who, from the time she made her presence felt in cheesecake photos and then in movies right up the moment you are reading with, has never ceased to delight in this singular creature?

I don’t know if it’s possible to create a savior fantasy in which the whole point is that the protagonist is doomed but it’s the hubris of both Dominik, who adapted the novel as well as directed and, in that novel, Oates to position themselves as the ones who are able to get past the fantasies and slanders of the studio moguls and directors and paparazzi and gossip columnists and hangers on and pimps and controlling husbands and see poor Marilyn—sorry, Norma Jeane—for who she was. And what do they see? A woman who spent her life searching for the father she never had, haunted by the abandonment of a mother who went mad.

No kidding. That’s what they’ve come up with.

Blonde, laid out in shifting aspect ratios and film stock, distorted lenses, switching from color to black & white, is a garish expressionistic illustration of what was already in Oates’ novel: claptrap Freudianism, victimization feminism, and the moral shock over the squalidness of Hollywood that, whether it’s being sold via scandal sheets or novels with a literary pedigree, never fails to attract people who want to indulge their own sanctimonious voyeurism. Oates, the most morbid of celebrated American writers, has always filtered her tabloid sensibility through a cold high-Gothic approach that affords her literary cache while fending off charges of sensationalism. It’s a decidedly anti-sensual approach and particularly unsuited to a figure as sensual as Marilyn Monroe—unless your goal is to depict Marilyn as nothing but a victim trafficked by powerful men and then used up by us, the public who, going to her movies, thrilled by her photo shoots, charmed or turned on or just made happy by the fact of her, were little more than her johns.

Blonde proceeds through a flash-card chronology in which Marilyn, played by Ana de Armas, is used or abused by, in turn, her mad mother; the studio system (when she goes for her interview at 20 th Century Fox with Darryl Zanuck he rapes her); the two sexually ambiguous sons of Hollywood stars—Charlie Chaplin, Jr. and Edward G. Robinson, Jr.—who form a throuple with Marilyn while using her for what they can get; her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, played by Bobby Cannavale and referred to in the movie’s mythic terms as “the Ex-Athlete” who regards her movie career as little more than prostitution; her third husband, Arthur Miller (“the Playwright”) played by Adrien Brody, who worries about what being married to a sex symbol does to his intellectual status; and of course the public, never presented as individuals who, by themselves, might act rudely or kindly or starstruck but as a uniformly voracious and threatening mass.

When Oates recreated the famous New York City nighttime location shoot for The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn stood on the subway grating while her dress was blown up around her, she described it like the climactic scene in The Day of the Locust (the touchstone Hollywood novel for people who hate Hollywood), a movie premiere that turns into a riot. As Oates wrote it, it was a human sacrifice in the making. The one person in the crowd who doesn’t want to devour Marilyn, DiMaggio, beats her when she returns to their hotel because he thinks she displayed herself like a whore.

Dominik shoots the scene in much the same way. It’s one of several times in the movie where the crowds turned out to see Marilyn, here overwhelmingly men, are shot in harsh glaring black-and-white, their open screaming mouths distended to appear like maws, like the onlookers in a Weegee photo. The movie tells us that Marilyn is being exploited for the sake of this rabble. But who’s doing the exploiting when Dominik sticks his camera up Marilyn’s dress so that de Armas’s behind fills the screen (giving us a view no one on Lexington Avenue and 52nd St had on that night in 1954)? Who’s doing the exploiting when, in a later scene, Marilyn is summoned to New York to service JFK and, as the President pushes her head down onto his crotch, there is a repeated shot of de Armas, eyes tearing and nearly gagging as her head bobs up and down in the frame?

I’m not doubting that Marilyn was subjected to all kinds of boorish behavior or that JFK treated her as callously as any of his other trophy lays. My argument is not with what Blonde is about—the exploitation of this singular star—but with how it’s about what it’s about. We see Marilyn, having undergone an abortion in order to star in Gentleman Prefer Blondes , saying of the acclaim showered on her at the movie’s premiere, “For this I killed my baby?”, surely a line to confirm every certainty in Samuel Alito’s meager little soul. It’s not that there’s something inherently retrograde about suggesting a woman might regret having an abortion but when we’re given a line like that, or later when Marilyn is expecting Miller’s baby and Dominik introduces a talking fetus—I swear to God—asking if mommy will kill him too, the movie is dealing in the cheapest Operation Rescue tactics.

Blonde has been talked about as if it were going to be Ana de Armas’s breakout role and I wouldn’t trust anybody who’s seen her work before this and not been excited by the prospect of what’s to come. Her sequence in No Time to Die , both when she’s engaging in badinage with Daniel Craig and then joining him to fight off the bad guys, showed a real sense for play. She made everything she did look like a good time, and she suggested that she might be one of those rare movie presences who’s at her sexiest when being funny. Here, her rendition of the breathy Marilyn voice we know from the movies and her physical bearing in the photographs and film sequences that Dominik recreates are often startlingly precise. But there’s no room for her to play beyond those imitations. De Armas has been directed to play Marilyn as if Marilyn were a Marilyn Monroe character. And that is the film’s point. Blonde wants us to believe Marilyn has been swallowed up by the screen persona, leaving nothing behind but gestures and inflections. This Marilyn is a breathless doll who exists solely as a plaything for the powerful.

So you can’t feel insulted for her when a casting director scorns her claim that she’s read Dostoevsky or when Miller thinks she’s been fed a line comparing one of his plays to Chekov (you’d have to be fed a line to make that claim). Dominik, though, seems to think we will be, not seeing his far greater insult. De Armas has some fine moments when Marilyn prepares to speak in auditions, when you feel her summoning the power to make the scene real, and when Marilyn and Miller first meet, she and Brody are allowed an extended scene in which they can connect with each other and communicate the pleasure in this unexpected introduction without any interference from Dominik. But de Armas has been given a thesis to play, not a character. Her screen glories will come. They aren’t here.

Blonde , both movie and book, seem awfully taken by the notion that “Marilyn Monroe” was a creation. Do Oates and Dominik think the movies are meant to be real? And don’t they understand just how real the movies can seem? In one of the greatest films ever made, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo , a detective falls in love with a woman and then, when she dies, tries to remake her in another woman. The detective finds out the woman he loved never really existed in the first place, she was made up to lure him into a plot. And yet he’s real to her. He’s held her in his arms and kissed her. And for us in the audience who have only seen this woman as shadows and light projected on a screen, she’s no less real. Of course, Marilyn Monroe was made up and of course she was real. That’s what art is—the fictive, the created striking a chord in us to produce real emotion. Would Oates think the characters in her novels are less because they’re fictions? And why is Dominik, a movie director, buying into this nonsense?

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Blonde , book and movie, is that neither Oates or Dominik seem to even like Marilyn that much. There is scarcely a mention of a performance in Oates’s novel unmarked by the scorn she pours on how the film was received by the crude public. Marilyn can’t even sneak disguised into a theater to watch The Seven Year Itch without being driven away by a man masturbating a few seats over from her. And in a remarkably revealing interview with Dominik in the current issue of the British film magazine Sight & Sound , the interviewer Christina Newland writes in her intro that Dominik “seems genuinely gobsmacked when I tell him many of my friends and colleagues watch—and enjoy— Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), which he regards, like most of Monroe’s films, as what he calls “cultural artefacts.” A director still early in his career regards the work of, among others, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Henry Hathaway, and John Huston as no more than cultural artefacts? Jump up and down Andy and let us hear ‘em clank together.

Oates’s novel is 738 pages in its current paperback edition. Dominik’s movie is two hours and forty-six minutes. Those respective lengths are not the result of an expansive vision or a gathering cumulative force. They are the result of their creators’ determination, by sheer volume and repetition, to bludgeon the audience into accepting their puny, constricted view of Marilyn Monroe. There isn’t, in a page of Oates’ novel or a moment of Dominik’s film, that contains a laugh, a smile, a grace note. And yet they put forth this grinding grimness in what seems clearly intended to be a feminist statement.

But when you deny a character’s capacity for pleasure and joy; when, her famous fragility notwithstanding, you take away every bit of her ability to make her own decisions; when (as Newland confronted Dominik with) you leave out the facts that Marilyn started her own production company, that she publicly supported Miller when he was being hounded by HUAC, that she used her celebrity to get Ella Fitzgerald a headlining engagement in a Hollywood club when Black singers weren’t given those gigs; when you reduce her talent to nothing more than lewd sex jokes and tawdry exploitation; when you insist that the happiness and pleasure and yes, the love that people have felt for her for seventy years is nothing more than the collective gross appetite of the lumpen; when you put forth that view even though your protagonist is one of the most famous women in the world and the public record is there to refute you; when you reduce someone’s artistry to the machinations of a dumb-bunny sex robot then who is it that’s using Marilyn Monroe to fulfill their fantasies and prejudices and favored shibboleths? Among the many not-very-bright things Dominik says in that Sight & Sound interview, there’s this: “She was the Aphrodite of the 20th century, the American goddess of love. And she killed herself. So what does that mean?” Clearly, for both Dominik and Oates, it means that Marilyn died for our collective sexist sins. I’ll be damned if I accept any vision of Marilyn Monroe from these two, both so eager to perform their own sordid crucifixion.

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‘Blonde’: Ana de Armas Is a Revelation as Marilyn Monroe in This Dark Portrait of Misogyny

FEEDING FRENZY

Filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s nightmarish Netflix feature about the life and times of Marilyn Monroe indicts everyone for how the screen icon was treated—including the audience.

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

Blonde opens with spherical spotlights and flashbulbs violently illuminating Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) , along with glimpses of the circuitry and mechanisms within them—an ideal metaphor for this blindingly striking and harrowing biography-cum-myth of victimization and performance.

Writer/director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 fictionalization of the iconic actress’ life is a kaleidoscopic movie about dreams and reality, sanity and delusion, the authentic and the phony, the past and the present, and the self and the guises constructed to both mask and convey its true nature. Led by de Armas’ hypnotically soulful evocation of Monroe’s longing and despair, it’s a triumph that strives for truth through florid, glamorous artifice. As such, it’s not only about its subject, but also an expression of her—mind, body, and soul.

The Norma Jeane of Blonde (in theaters now; September 28 on Netflix) is a woman tormented. Her humble childhood is spent with an unhinged and hysterical mother ( Julianne Nicholson ) who seeks self-destruction in the inferno and begets in her daughter a lifelong yearning for her absentee father, whom she’s told is a dashing Clark Gable-ish actor on the perpetual precipice of returning. Anguished daddy issues, fear of rejection, and the cinema thus chaotically commingle inside the young girl, and that continues once the film abruptly leaps forward to a future in which Norma is a platinum-blonde pin-up. In an acting studio, a teacher states that “the circle of light is yours,” and where she should create a mental character that’s separate from her own identity. Create one she (and the movie studio) does in Marilyn Monroe, a persona of peerless, magnetic sex appeal whom Dominik routinely highlights as a distinct entity from Norma via images of the aspiring actress staring at herself—as if to grasp who she is and what she’s become—in the mirror.

That reflective motif, coupled with round explosions of light, dresser drawers (which her mother used for a makeshift crib), and the ringing of a phone—always portending the promise of her father’s reappearance and/or the terrifying demands of her career—is everywhere in Blonde . Dominik doesn’t sculpt his film from traditional, leaden blocks of biopic clay; rather, he stitches it together from wispy bits and pieces of life, lore, and fanciful reveries. His Marilyn is an artist and individual engaged, at heart, in a game of make-believe for the camera, the public, and herself. Her stage-name alter ego allows her to play a part that grants her distance from her near-ceaseless pain and misery, brought about by casting-couch rapes and multiple abortions (Monroe’s CGI fetus chiding her for perpetrating the same cruel rejection as her own mother), or by the husbands—Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ) and Arthur Miller ( Adrien Brody )—who view her as a “vessel” for their selfish wants and needs, and toss her aside when she can’t, or won’t, fulfill them.

Blonde is a vortex of surrogate fathers, impersonations and projections, all of them blending and doubling back on themselves in borderline-hallucinatory fashion. Collaborating with cinematographer Chayse Irvin, Dominik flip-flops between black-and-white and color, as well as employs varying film speeds, degrees of focus and aspect ratios, with balletic fluidity. Complemented by Nick Cave and Walter Ellis’ swooning score, his aesthetics are attuned to Monroe’s poignantly bifurcated condition, not to mention amplify the material’s down-the-rabbit-hole energy. Moreover, he crafts an array of compositions—some baroque recreations of moments from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like it Hot , others offhand snapshots—that capture Monroe’s grand beauty and, also, the constant, rapacious presence of the male gaze (whether filtered through a camera or not) that simultaneously places her on a pedestal and threatens to devour her.

Blonde is a film about performance and the many ways in which it conceals and reveals. To that end, de Armas’ turn is nothing short of a tour de force. In certain moments, the actress’ embodiment of Monroe is so believable with regard to look, body language and voice (she absolutely nails the star’s breathiness) that one almost gasps. Concurrently, though, she wields stylization as a means of locating something deeper, darker, and more intrinsic. It’s a strategy that speaks to the synergy between the genuine and the artificial that’s at the core of this endeavor, and is one Monroe herself embraces during a standout audition that’s derided for its honest intensity. Balancing Monroe’s incessantly weepy distress with sincere vulnerability and marquee radiance, as well as deftly navigating her intellectual and emotional ups and downs, de Armas is a multifaceted, three-dimensional wonder.

There’s scandalous suffering throughout Blonde , including a late sexual assault at the hands of President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson)—the last of Monroe’s would-be “daddy” figures—which solidifies the proceedings as a rapturous torture chamber of misogynistic exploitation and abuse. The horror of being sculpted into, and therefore reduced to, merely a sexual plaything courses through the film’s veins, and is epitomized by a late slow-motion red-carpet panorama (from Monroe’s POV) of screaming male admirers’ faces, their mouths warping into monstrous Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -style maws. Dominik imagines the agony and the ecstasy of it all in uniformly gorgeous fashion, thereby further casting the various facets of Monroe’s life and career as ingredients of a bewitchingly illusory and poisonous stew.

Love and sadism, togetherness and alienation, compassion and brutality, Norma and Marilyn, Marilyn and de Armas—there are no boundaries in Dominik’s film, just a woozy cine-swirl of intertwined compulsions, affectations, and tears. Blonde ’s grandeur stems from its marriage of the entrancing and the appalling, as well as its understanding that the two were, for Monroe, lifelong bedfellows. The director traces paths between his protagonist’s personal and professional experiences, her then and her now (at least, until her overdose death in 1962), with a silkiness that charms and wounds. More potent still, he does so while also intriguingly implicating viewers in Monroe’s fate. From recurring shots of gala premiere audiences staring in delight at a theatrical screen (sometimes surrounding a sad Monroe), to a late vision of Monroe puking on Dominik’s toilet-ensconced camera, Blonde doesn’t let the movies—or us—off the hook for elevating and tearing down the 20 th century’s preeminent object of desire.

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Blonde Review: Ana de Armas Is Stunningly Good As Marilyn Monroe

Blonde review: it is an unrelentingly bleak commentary on stardom and the toll it takes on a woman yearning in vain for emotional anchors..

Ana de Armas in Blonde . (courtesy: ana_d_armas )

Cast: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Julianne Nicholson, Tygh Runyan, Michael Draye, Sara Paxton, Evan Willliams and Xavier Samuel

Director: Andrew Dominik

Rating : 2 Stars (out of 5)

Andrew Dominik's    Blonde , anything but a biopic of the conventional kind, delivers a fragmented and flawed portrayal of the incessant turmoil of Marilyn Monroe's life in and beyond the Hollywood spotlight. It is an unrelentingly bleak commentary on stardom and the toll it takes on a woman yearning in vain for emotional anchors.

Flashes of stylistic brilliance are only to be expected from the director of Killing Them Softly and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but these are too few and far between to collectively translate into a consistently hypnotic piece of cinema.

The only thing in the mostly black and white, A-rated Netflix film that does not waver at all is Ana de Armas' interpretation of the blonde bombshell who wanted to be much more than what the world was willing to let her be. Confusion, vulnerability, thwarted aspirations, hurt and hope intermingle imperceptibly in her remarkably layered performance.

The punishing length - Blonde is nearly three hours long - the plodding pace, the whimsical structure and the overwrought stylisation combine to make this a film that is almost as exacting as the ebbs of the life that it puts on the screen.

Messy divorces, an abortion, a miscarriage, several humiliating encounters with men and other unsettling reverses overshadow the hype and hoopla that surround the advent of "the newest box-office sensation".

Red carpet events where Marilyn is the centre of attraction, delirious fans chanting her name, shutterbugs falling over each other to capture every moment of her life - the rise and rise of Marilyn Monroe quickly erases the vestiges of Norma Jean, a little girl pining for a father she has never seen.

Based on Joyce Carol Oates turn-of-the-millennium novel of the same name, Dominik's screenplay struggles to strike a balance between fictional flourishes and the factual elements as it pieces together the causes of - and the circumstances in which - Marilyn Monroe descending into enervating despair in an industry where glitz and glamour mattered much more than the deep scars on a ruthlessly exploited woman's soul.

In a role that tests her to the fullest, Armas is stunningly good, giving the lie to the doubts expressed over the wisdom of casting a Cuban-Spanish actress as Marilyn Monroe. She sinks completely into the role and becomes the person she plays in every conceivable way. She glides through a range of emotions and psychological somersaults in the face of the grave harm that the men in her life and demands of her movie career do to her.

The occasional surreal passages that Dominik weaves into the film, when at their best, shine through and lend the intense drama a distinctive tone and texture. However, Blonde errs in dealing with Monroe's unending troubles with a somewhat heavy hand that leads to monotony. In the bargain the film falls short of being consistently intriguing and moving.

Blonde refrains from calling baseball star Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and writer Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody) by their names, choosing instead to refer to the two men as Ex-Athlete and The Playwright. In contrast, the "two juniors of men who never wanted us" - Charles Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Willliams) - are specifically identified as part of a Gemini threesome that they formed with Norma Jean at a stage of her career when she had just about begun to find her way around, a process that never quite ended as long as she lived.

In one scene, Marilyn says: "It's been so wonderful this past year, like a fairy tale." In another, she says to the Ex-Athlete who is now her husband: "I've been happy all my life." The irony of these utterances is self-evident in the light of what has gone before and what is to come in a life buffeted by waves of misfortune.

It is Norma Jean's desperate and infructuous attempts to not let the Marilyn Monroe myth subsume her entire being that take centrestage and push all other facets of the woman's life and times out of the frame. The grey portrait of pain is exhausting at times because Blonde opts not to carve out space for anything other than the crushing indignities that are heaped upon the protagonist.

Blonde is more a Freudian drama than a typical Hollywood biopic. It roots all of Monroe's miseries in a childhood trauma whose effects she is never able to shrug off. Norma is an orphan. Her mentally ill mother is institutionalised when she is only seven years old and the little girl has no idea who her father is. All that her mother lets on is that he was "a titan in the industry'.

Later in the film, a "tearful father" writes letters to her "beautiful lost daughter" promising to contact her soon in person. His continued absence and the vow to make amends are represented by a reassuring voice that at points seems capable of restoring Marilyn's faith in life and men. Her severe daddy fixation impacts her relationship with her husbands, leaving her at the mercy of masculine whims.

On the day that she first steps into the office of a Hollywood bigwig, Marilyn is subjected to a sexual assault. By the time she has been through many other such experiences, Blonde stages an encounter between a US President - "the boyishly handsome leader of the free world" - and the fraught Hollywood diva. In a timorous monologue addressed to her own self in the middle of the act, she wonders why she has ended up where she has.

She is asked: Who gave you a start in the movies? Her reply sums up her confusion: "I guess I was discovered." The film is, of course, not so much about how she landed up in the industry or who spotted her as about her own discovery of the high price that one must pay in order to achieve and sustain stardom in a toxic industry swarming with powerful men preying on the weak.

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Norma Jean forays into the movies as a rank outsider, as an absolutely clueless ingenue, as a lamb to the slaughter. Over the next decade and a bit - that is all she was allowed by a brutally self-serving world - Marilyn seeks happiness and fulfilment only to find grief waiting for her at every turn.

That is pretty much the story of Blonde . Its search for highs does not always yield the best results. The film has a line spoken in the context of Marilyn Monroe's fate: the soul does not always show on the face. Blonde , too, has a soul that does not fully reflect on the face.

Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Julianne Nicholson, Tygh Runyan, Michael Draye, Sara Paxton, Evan Willliams and Xavier Samuel

Andrew Dominik

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'The Fall Guy' review: Ryan Gosling brings his A game as a lovestruck stuntman

In “Barbie,” Ryan Gosling ’s job is Beach. In “ The Fall Guy, ” it’s Stunt and he’s pretty great at his gig.

Gosling nicely follows up his Oscar-nominated Ken turn as an embattled Everyman who falls 12 stories, gets thrown through glass and pulls off an epic car jump, among other death-defying moments in the breezily delightful “Fall Guy” (★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday).

Director David Leitch, former stunt double for a fella named Brad Pitt, revamps the 1980s Lee Majors TV show as an action-comedy ode to the stunt performers who never get their due, while Gosling and Emily Blunt dazzle as likable exes who reconnect amid gonzo circumstances.

"I'm not the hero of this story. I'm just the stunt guy," says Colt Seavers (Gosling) in voiceover as we first meet him. Colt is considered Hollywood's best stuntman, doubling for egotistical A-lister Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and fostering a flirty relationship with camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt). However, a stunt goes accidentally awry in his latest movie, breaking his back as well as disrupting his love life, mental health and entire status quo.

'The Fall Guy': Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt talk 'epic' 'I'm Just Ken' Oscars performance

A year later, down on his luck and confidence still shaken, Colt is parking cars as a valet at a burrito joint when he gets a call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). Jody, now an on-the-rise director, needs him in Sydney to work on her first huge sci-fi epic “Metalstorm.” He gets there and after a gnarly cannon roll in a stunt car where he takes out a camera, Colt learns that not only did Jody not ask for him, she doesn’t want him around at all. 

Still, the old spark's there and it turns out she does really need him: Tom has befriended some shady dudes and gone missing, and Gail tasks Colt to both keep Tom's disappearance a secret and also find the dude. Alongside stunt coordinator and pal Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), Colt uncovers a criminal conspiracy and in the process goes undercover as Tom in a nightclub (wearing some Ken-esque shades and cool coat), gets so high he sees unicorns and teams up with a dog that only takes commands in French.

Colt is put through the physical ringer during his twisty hero's journey, and it’s impossible not to love him through every punch, kick, stab and dangerous feat because of Gosling’s offbeat charisma. Before “Barbie,” he showed his considerable comedic talents in “The Nice Guys” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” yet marries them well here with a healthy amount of vulnerable masculinity and sublime nuance. With him, a thumbs-up – the stuntman’s go-to signal that everything’s OK – is also a way for Colt to try and hide his sensitivities.

Like Leitch’s other movies, from “Bullet Train” to “Atomic Blonde,” “Fall Guy” is filled with fights, explosions and assorted derring-do for Colt to (barely) live through. One mayhem-filled car chase scene has Gosling’s character tussling with a goon on an out-of-control trailer interspersed with Blunt singing Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds.” (It's essentially a two-hour argument for a stunt Oscar category.) The movie sports a definite musical heart, with an amusing scene between Jody and a weepy Colt set to the Taylor Swift lovelorn jam “All Too Well,” and is also interestingly timely considering a plot point about deep fake technology.

The one downside with this sort of stunt spectacular is Colt’s mission to find the narcissistic Tom and getting into hazardous shenanigans takes away from his romantic stuff with Blunt. Playful and quick with the zingers, their characters awkwardly rekindle their romance – in one sequence, she spills all sorts of tea about their past relationship in front of their crew – and you miss them when they're not together.

For ’80s kids, Majors was the “Fall Guy” – and Leitch’s movie pays tribute in multiple ways to the show and its scrappy spirit – but Gosling makes for a fabulous heir apparent. He’s not just Ken. He’s also Colt, and Gosling’s not done showing us the true extent of his talents. 

'The Fall Guy' an escapist treat rich with spectacular action, romantic banter

When you’ve got jaw-dropping stunts and the playful chemistry of ryan gosling and emily blunt, who cares whether the plot holds up.

A nearby explosion doesn’t stop a passionate moment between filmmaker Judy (Emily Blunt) and stuntman Colt (Ryan Gosling) in “The Fall Guy.”

Universal Pictures

How’s this for a Hollywood Full Circle story for you:

David Leitch was Brad Pitt’s stunt double on “Fight Club” and a number of other projects. Brad Pitt played a stunt double in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” David Leitch eventually became a top-tier action filmmaker, directing “Atomic Blonde,” “Deadpool 2” — and “Bullet Train,” starring Brad Pitt.

Now comes Leitch’s rousing and action-packed and funny and even heartwarming “The Fall Guy,” with Ryan Gosling playing a stuntman who often doubles for Hollywood’s biggest star — just as David Leitch once doubled for Brad Pitt. Ta-da! (Sidebar: This is the THIRD time Gosling has played some kind of stunt performer, after “Drive” and “The Place Beyond the Pines.”)

Loosely inspired by the Lee Majors-starring TV show from the 1980s and given a rocket-booster jolt of stardom from the pairing of Gosling and Emily Blunt, “The Fall Guy” is pure popcorn entertainment — an absolutely ludicrous yet consistently entertaining, old-fashioned action/romance combo platter that plays like a feature-length pitch to the Academy to add a best stunts category (as it should).

If you’re looking for anything more than an escapist adventure featuring two of our brightest stars exchanging banter in between kissing scenes, set against the backdrop of some jaw-dropping practical effects stunts (mostly performed, of course, by doubles who are filling in for Gosling), you’ve wandered into the wrong theater. The screenplay often falls back on lazy clichés (karaoke sequence, anyone?) and the final act takes place in a universe that has no connection to anything resembling reality, but the action sequences and the playful chemistry between Gosling and Blunt save the day.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays the arrogant movie star who lies about doing his own stunts.

“The Fall Guy” opens with Gosling’s Colt Seavers on the set of an action film starring the global superstar Tom Ryder (a self-deprecating Aaron Taylor-Johnson), an arrogant egomaniac who is constantly bragging about doing his own stunts. (Spoiler alert: He’s lying.) Colt doesn’t care about Ryder’s dismissive attitude toward him; he’s too busy gushing about the love affair he’s having with Emily Blunt’s Jody Moreno, a camera operator on the film. Why, it’s the stuff of movies!

Fast forward 18 months. After a near-fatal accident on that set, Colt is a broken man in more ways than one. He’s retired from stunt work, he has a job as a valet, and he has fallen off the grid. When the powerful producer Gail Meyer (a hilarious Hannah Waddingham) rings Colt and offers him a job on a big-budget sci-fi epic shooting in Australia starring none other than Tom Ryder, he has no interest in returning to the game — until Gail informs him that Jody is directing the film in her feature debut. Down Under here we come!

Once Colt arrives on the location set for “Metalstorm,” which looks like a cross between “Dune” and “Mad Max,” he learns Jody is still furious with him for ghosting her. She takes it out on him by ordering repeated takes of a particularly painful stunt, all the while airing her grievances over a bullhorn. Winston Duke scores some laughs as a stunt coordinator who often quotes dialogue from action blockbusters, while Stephanie Hsu is terrific as Tom Ryder’s long-suffering personal assistant.

When Tom goes missing for reasons that defy logic, it’s an excuse for Colt to put his stunt man skills to work as he investigates, finds himself mixed up in all sorts of dangerous hijinks and is eventually framed for murder. If you spend even a nanosecond examining the particulars of the case and the developments that ensue, the whole structure falls apart — so it’s best to just sit back and marvel at the amazing stunt work

“The Fall Guy” is filled with self-referential, “meta” moments, whether it’s a scene where Colt enters a booth where his face can be scanned for use in perpetuity, or a sequence in which Jody and Colt are on the phone, discussing the possibility of Jody employing a split-screen technique in “Metalstorm,” and the conversation itself is rendered in … split-screen. Even the plot of “Metalstorm” is one big metaphor for the relationship between Colt and Jody. None of it this is particularly subtle, but it’s good fun, and it continues all the way through the closing credits, where we get to see the real-life stunt performers who did nomination-worthy work on the film.

If only the Academy had a category in which they could be nominated.

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Movie Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are great fun in ‘The Fall Guy’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Emily Blunt, right, and Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Winston Duke in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling, left, in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Emily Blunt, left, and Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

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One of the worst movie sins is when a comedy fails to at least match the natural charisma of its stars. Not all actors are capable of being effortlessly witty without a tightly crafted script and some excellent direction and editing. But Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt seem, at least from afar, adept at that game. Just look at their charming press tour for “The Fall Guy.” Theirs is the kind of fun banter that can be a little worrisome — what if their riffing is better than the movie?

It comes as a great relief, then, that “The Fall Guy” lives up to its promise. Here is a delightful blend of action, comedy and romance that will make the audience feel like a Hollywood insider for a few hours (although there are perhaps one too many jokes about Comic-Con and Hall H).

Loosely based on the 1980s Lee Majors television series about a stuntman who made some extra cash on the side bounty hunting, Gosling takes up the mantle of said stunt guy, Colt Seavers.

Colt is a workaday stunt performer and longtime go-to for a major movie star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tom is the kind of deeply egotistical and self-conscious A-lister who tells everyone he does his own stunts and worries out loud about Colt’s jawline being distractingly softer than his. I think the word “potato” is thrown around as a descriptor. Taylor-Johnson has quite a bit of fun playing up all his eccentricities that you hope, and fear, are at least somewhat inspired by real horror stories of stars behaving badly.

The film comes from director David Leitch, the Brad Pitt stuntman and stunt coordinator who helped bring “John Wick” to the world and directed “Atomic Blonde” and “Bullet Train.” He’s a guy who not only has the vision and know-how to bring the best in stunts to films and make them pop, but also has a vested interest in putting them in the spotlight. Forget the Oscar, how about just any acknowledgement? Perhaps “The Fall Guy” is just one tiny step on the path to making audiences more aware of some of the behind-the-scenes people who really make movies better and risk it all to do so.

It’s revealing that the movie starts with Colt suffering a terrible injury on a set. The stunt that goes wrong is one he’s just done and doesn’t seem remotely nervous about. The film cuts to his recovery and semi-reclusive retirement until he gets a call from Tom’s producer Gail (a delightfully over-the-top Hannah Waddingham) begging Colt to come back for a new film. They need him, she pleads, as does his longtime crush Jody (Blunt), who is making her directorial debut. She waits to inform him that Tom is missing and he’s the one who has to find him. On the quest, Colt encounters tough-guy goons, enablers, a sword-wielding actress, and a dead body on ice that all lead up to something big and rotten. And like a selfless stunt guy, he does it all out of sight of Jody — trying his best to save her movie without giving her something extra to worry about. Nothing about it is particularly plausible, but it’s not hard to get on board for the ride, and much of that is because of Gosling.

While he’s not quite underappreciated for his comedic timing, especially after “Barbie,” it’s fun to get to see him really embrace and lean into the goofiness — whether it’s crying and singing along to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” or quoting movie lines to his stunt coordinator pal (Winston Duke, always a good addition) in the midst of an actual fight.

There is something very juvenile and sweet about Jody and Colt’s will-they-won’t-they romance, with its mix of attraction, banter, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. It was a genius stroke to cast these two opposite each other and it leaves you wanting more scenes with the two.

Working with a script from Drew Pearce (“Hobbs & Shaw”), Leitch packs the film with wall-to-wall action, in both the film’s movie sets and its real world. And with the self-referential humor, the industry jokes and the promise of a little romance, it feels like one of those movies we all complain they don’t make anymore.

“The Fall Guy,” a Universal Picture release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “action and violence, drug content and some strong language.” Running time: 126 minutes. Three stars out of four.