It was over a year ago when I heard that Ana de Armas was going to play the role of Marilyn Monroe in a biopic about the actress, and I knew right off the bat that she was perfect for the role. For more than a year I looked forward to seeing this movie, even when Netflix later announced the film would be rated NC-17. Now, after watching this film on a wet and rainy afternoon, I found myself wasting three hours of my life I will never get back.
Incidentally, I suspect the scenes that deemed the film NC-17 were insert shots -- filmed after production and inserted into the finished film to claim justification for the rating. To be fair, I have seen films rated R that had more graphic scenes than this one so the rating was not necessary and (I suspect) was nothing more than a marketing ploy.
The movie follows Norma Jean's life from a troubled little girl with a mentally disturbed mother to her untimely and unintentional overdose in 1962. She was a silver screen emblem for the era's sexual revolution that was to become synonymous with the 1960s. She could sing and dance and proved she could act and play a role -- not just be a pretty face on the silver screen. But Andrew Dominik not only wrote the screenplay (based on Joyce Carol Oates' novel of fiction) and directed the almost three-hour movie, chose instead to focus on her trials and tribulations as a tormented soul. In Blonde, Monroe faced the notorious casting couch, laughed at multiple times when she mentioned a book she read, physically beaten by her second husband, and was humiliated by the most powerful man in the country. What I hoped would have been a biography of triumphs was a three hour biopic of a woman abused and tormented. This was streamed on Netflix but had I paid for a movie ticket, I would have asked for my money back. No one wants to pay to see a depressing movie.
Andrew Dominik's direction was terrible. It has been eleven years since I watched a movie with terrible direction and that was Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance back in 2011. That movie, if I recall correctly, had two directors and neither had enough experienced behind the camera to direct a major Hollywood production with a large production. They played with the camera in a manner as to make the movie a business card, but playing with the camera was a bad decision. In Blonde, Dominik did the exact same by filming every scene in a different manner from 1955 VistaVision to replicating a scene from the 1962 cult classic, Carnival of Souls. Worse, the script was written with the assumption the viewers knew everything about Marilyn Monroe -- a challenge for anyone writing a biopic but more often overlooked in such pictures. It seemed like every ten minuets I had to lean over and explain to my wife who the person on the screen was, that she had a number of miscarriages, that she was an obsessive reader, and other factoids that were never explained or revealed in the movie and were (apparently) necessary to understand the dialogue exchanged on screen.
There were three movies on my "must-see" list this year and Blonde was one of them. I know sometimes, over a period of months, my expectations go up and the movie I wanted to see was below par as a result. Believe me, I went in with no expectations for this movie.
Ana de Armas should receive an Oscar nomination for best performance. As Marilyn Monroe, she was perfect. Adrian Brody was great as Arthur Miller. But what might have been the best performance ever given by Ana de Armas could not save this movie.
