Blonde

 Obviously, Andrew Dominik, the director of Blonde (2022, Netflix), is an admirer of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull,  Stylistically, Blonde closely resembles Scorsese's bio-pic about the boxer Jake LaMotta.  Blonde is mostly shot in black-and-white, however with interpolated color footage and sketches Marilyn Monroe's life in terms defined by titles setting the year in which the action occurs; there are shots in Dominik's movie that recapitulate key images in Raging Bull -- particularly, scenes in which the heroine is surrounded by photographers with explosive flash-bulbs; in Blonde, the photographers are surrounded by grotesque men with gaping mouths, a carnival of ugly depravity through which the camera tracks.  As in Raging Bull, the action is repetitive -- La Motta is a jealous brute who savages everyone around him and the film shows him destroying relationships with those closest to him again and again; in Blonde, Norma Jeane is the perfect victim:  we see her pregnant not once but three times and, on each occasion, losing or aborting the child  -- she has four sexual relationships depicted in the film, each of them degrading and, ultimately, destructive to her.  Again and again, she is exploited and victimized.  Raging Bull is a great masterpiece, probably the most important film made in the last fifty years as shown, in fact, by the Dominik's reliance on film's stylistic and structural features; Blonde is an unmitigated catastrophe, unbearably dull and lugubrious, a slow, funereal march toward Marilyn's inevitable suicide.  Scorsese makes a film about an alpha male athlete who brutalizes everyone around him -- the film is assertive, with an insanely domineering hero; Dominik's movie is about a hapless woman who is brutalized by everyone around her -- the film's narrative is absurdly passive and Marilyn Monroe is depicted as insanely submissive and masochistic.  Raging Bull works; Blonde doesn't -- it's hard to know if this is a consequence of gender roles and expectations or, simply, the result of the difficulty of making a compelling film about someone who is wholly passive, someone who is acted upon but who doesn't act herself; a writer once said that Bertolucci's The Last Emperor demonstrates the impossibility of making a truly effective movie featuring a passive hero.  Within fifteen minutes, we get the gist of Blonde and the rest of the picture is just a simple-minded, one note, waste of celluloid, or digital data, as the case may be.

Little Norma Jeane's life gets off to a bad start.  Her mother tells the child that her absent daddy loves her, but has also abandoned the family.  Psycho mom shows the little girl pictures of a handsome swarthy fellow with a debonair panama hat -- why Norma's father is imagined as a Latin lover is unclear and never addressed in the film.  After driving the child around in a hellish firestorm (LA is burning), mom tries to drown the little girl in the bathtub.  Things go downhill from there:  Norma falls into the clutches of a Harvey Weinstein lookalike who forces her into coitus a tergo -- poor Norma grimaces at the camera as she is raped from behind.  Somehow, she ends up in photogenic if inscrutable love affair in which she sleeps with the namesake children of Charley Chaplin and Edgar G. Robinson.  Of course, this ends badly.  After a few more misadventures -- she's as unlucky as de Sade's Justine, Norma, now known as Marilyn Monroe, meets up with Joe DiMaggio. He introduces her to his Italian family, a bunch of dark-eyed, dark-haired women who obviously regard her as a hussy and trollop.  When Marilyn poses for the famous shot on the subway grating (dress ballooning up around her) in The Seven Year Itch, DiMaggio goes berserk and beats her up.  Next, she falls in love with Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody).  Miller admires her intellect -- Marilyn knows all about Chekhov and intuitively understands his plays better than he does.  Unfortunately, at a gathering on the Maine seacoast, Marliyn trips in the sand, inducing a miscarriage.  Apparently, this wrecks her relationship with the playwright.  In 1962, she flies cross-country to be hustled into a hotel room where JFK is managing the Cuban missile crisis and watching Earth v. Flying Saucers on TV.  With the bored Secret Service staff sitting about ten feet from the bed, Marilyn gets forced into oral sex with JFK.  We hear her interior monologue, in which she seems mostly concerned about swallowing properly, not gagging, and not puking all over the presidential penis.  (She has said that she's delivered to the hotel room like a parcel of meat.)  Marilyn has yet another abortion -- this filmed from the perspective of the unfortunate fetus in utero -- we get a showy shot of a speculum prying open the heroine's vagina.  (If this child is supposed to be JFK's spawn, it's not evident to me how fellatio can result in pregnancy, but who knows:  Dominik is an Australian and, maybe, things work differently Down Under). Back at home, Marilyn learns that Charley Chaplin, Jr., the bi-sexual with whom she had a menage a trois (with Edgar G. Robinson, Jr.!) has committed suicide.  Throughout the movie, Marilyn has received letters at two or three year intervals from her "tearful daddy" -- this is her absent father who apologizes to her profusely and expresses a desire to meet her.  (I counted five such letters, all, more or less, the same, ostensibly from the "tearful daddy".)  As a final, sadistic blow, Charley Chaplin Jr. reaches out from the grave to tell poor Norma Jeane that he was the author of the "tearful daddy" letters and that there is no such paternal figure.  This revelation destroys Marilyn and she sucks down a dozen barbiturates with whisky, bringing an end to her whole sorry existence.  Monroe's career as a film actress is basically ignored.  However, in one bizarre sequence, we see Billy Wilder directing the actress in Some Like it Hot, probably Monroe's best and most endearing role.  Dominik choses to make Marilyn Monroe's most iconic performance into an exercise in degradation -- she's shown raging over the fact that Wilder's script characterized her strut as "jello on springs".  This is unseemly and malicious -- Monroe's greatest and most sexually assertive performance is treated as a cruel joke on her.  (Clearly Dominik is alarmed at comparisons between his movie and Wilder's classic and, so, he childishly resolves his anxiety by trashing Some Like it Hot).  The movie is chicken-shit and lets the Kennedy brothers off the hook -- they were obviously complicit in her death and, indeed, may have murdered her.  So Dominik shows JFK as a boorish fool and chauvinistic pig, but not a conspirator in a murder.  Ultimately, Monroe is depicted as completely crazy -- she's as nuts as her psycho mother, a full-blown schizophrenic who has split into sex-bomb Marilyn Monroe and the hapless door-mat, Norma Jeane.  Monroe may have been promiscuous and some kind of drug addict qua alcoholic, but she obviously wasn't the hapless whack-job portrayed in the movie.  Dominik thinks he's making some sort of argument about sexual harassment and the patriarchy, but he indulges in just about every misogynistic trope that you can imagine.  The three abortion/miscarriage scenes, all of which are explicit, and two of which involve late-term talking fetuses (it would seem to me that Monroe's abortions would have occurred long before the embryo's developed big sorrowful eyes and could talk) make the heroine into nothing more than her uterine plumbing. 

There are a lot of lies printed about this movie.  But no one will admit that it is profoundly, nightmarishly boring.  Furthermore, critics claim that the picture is a mess but that Ana de Armas, who plays Marilyn, is brilliant.  This is gallant but untrue.  Armas turns in a one-note, lugubrious performance that is irritatingly monotonous.  And truth to tell, Armas doesn't have an iota of Marilyn Monroe's famous sex appeal -- her breasts are small and too girlish and she lacks the pot-belly and padding around the hips and derriere that made Monroe so irresistible.  Armas is skinny and fit; Monroe was voluptuous and always looked like her only exercise was boozing and sex.  If you believe, as I do, that Ana de Arma's performance is dull and unconvincing, then, there is literally nothing in this almost three-hour long film worth watching.