Grade: F
Blonde, the new Marilyn Monroe cinematic monstrosity, is a 2 hour and 46 minute ordeal. It is almost physically painful and unbearable to endure – the worst movie I’ve seen in 21 years. It’s available on Netflix for you to click as far away from as possible. I wanted to rewind back to the beginning when it was over, in the hopes that it would mean I’d never seen it. I thought about turning it off so many times, including less than 10 minutes in, but I forged ahead, curious to see where it…wasn’t going.
The film is like a hodgepodge assembly of cutting room floor footage from David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Oliver Stone – but the kind of material they’d have been smart enough to leave out. I am not a fan of biopics, but Blonde made me miss them. It’s not a usual biopic, but rather a dreamy, bleak, pessimistic look at Monroe’s life. Not much of one, either, when it comes to details. If we were to take the movie at face value as an accurate portrayal of her life, then she led the saddest, most miserable one ever – completely devoid of happiness and hope. It seemed to me she lived her life like a candle in a hurricane.
It starts with her as a child. Norma Jeane Mortenson. Her abusive alcoholic mother is “raising” her. The father is out of the picture, but little Norma Jeane has a lifelong ambition of meeting him. The unresolved issues and questions lead to her, as an adult, referring to all her boyfriends and husbands as “Daddy” an interminable number of times, just to make sure we get the point. Speaking of things that are beaten over our heads, if you want alcohol poisoning, take a drink every time they come back to the famous shot of the air from the grate blowing her skirt up. Marilyn, as she becomes known as an adult, still never meets her dad, but receives many letters from him, read to us in voice-over by an actor who sounds like he’s her age or younger.
Dialogue is clunky. There’s a scene where Marilyn is telling her manager she can’t accept a certain film role at the moment, and his reply sounds like he’s doing a Meisner acting exercise. “Not NOW? Why NOT now?” At another point, she’s on her way to get an abortion, and says (I am truly not making this up) “I’ve changed my mind! My mind’s my own to change.” Director Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) goes back and forth from black-and-white to color, seemingly at random. It gets very quiet, only to suddenly assault our ears with a loud line or sound effect. You will wear out the volume buttons on your remote control. The button I really wanted here was “delete.” There are three POV shots I could have done without. Two are when a medical tool goes inside her during an abortion, and the other is when she vomits on us in an airplane lavatory. If Blonde was shown as an in-flight movie, I would walk out.
Ana de Armas (Knives Out, Deep Water) stars as our Marilyn Monroe. She is a talented, confident, courageous performer. She spends much of her time in Blonde crying and being naked. Adrien Brody is the only other actor I recognized, as one of her husbands, playwright Arthur Miller. I found myself checking out the cast and crew on IMDb, mainly to make sure they made it through unscathed, and are still working and living and breathing. Y’all good?
It was such a relief to have finished watching Blonde, so I could return to real life, where birds are chirping and the colors are lovely outside. It’s not even good for roasting in real time, like Mystery Science Theater 3000. It left me feeling sad and dirty. I don’t think gentlemen will prefer Blonde. I certainly didn’t. If you’re curious to see it, I’d strongly recommend you reconsider. Your mind’s your own to change.
Grade: F
Film Reviews by Mark 
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