Direction: Andrew Dominik
Country: USA
Adapted from Joyce Carol Oates' bestseller, Blonde turns the life of Marilyn Monroe into an endlessly disgusting tableau that Ana de Armas couldn’t save despite her charisma.
In this fictional journey of real characters, Marilyn loses her mentally disturbed mother (Julianne Nicholson), spends the rest of her life searching for her unknown father, pays a high price to become a Hollywood celebrity, delves into a threesome relationship with Cass (Xavier Samuel) and Eddy (Evan Williams) - the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively - and has no luck in her marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and playwright/screenwriter Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody). She’s also mercilessly humiliated by president Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson).
Stylized both in color and black-and-white and probing mutable aspect ratios (for no apparent reason), the film is just pose with no essence found. It’s protracted and overdramatized with repetitive despondent tones that make it barely bearable.
The simulated biopic starts strong as a tense family drama, segueing into a dragging middle section before ending up in an uninspired delirium of damaging pregnancies and ‘daddy’ relationships marked by toxic masculinity. The direction of Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007) has some flashes of inspiration but is not to die for, while the script portrays the star almost as a dumb, without penetrating the woman's heart.
