Rating: NC-17
Runtime: 2 hours, 47 minutes
Director: Andrew Dominik
Quick Impressions:
First of all, I see no justification for this movie being rated NC-17. I’ve seen R-rated movies with far more graphic/disturbing content. (I tried to list some, and my brain immediately suggested, “Killer Joe, Blue is the Warmest Color, Midnight Cowboy.” Then I had to sigh in exasperation, “Sarah!” (I need some comic relief after watching that. At least I can laugh at myself.) But I swear this should not be rated NC-17. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more objectionable stuff on TV! (I guess there are a lot of naked breasts, but they all belong to the same person!) The rating would only make sense to me if the scene with JFK wasn’t simulated, and surely it is!
I finally watched this movie because Ana de Armas got a SAG nomination. I’ve been avoiding it. When the project was first announced, I got really excited because I liked Ana de Armas in Knives Out, and I love Marilyn Monroe. I was completely obsessed with Marilyn Monroe in middle school. Then I heard it was so gruelingly, torturously sad (which seemed easy to believe because her life was sad). I have very fond feelings for Marilyn Monroe. I wasn’t particularly eager to see her tortured on screen for three hours.
At the Golden Globes, Colin Farrell told Ana de Armas he cried himself to sleep after watching it. (And then the whole audience laughed, which seems weirdly fitting since in this movie–and in real life–audiences are wildly out of touch with how Marilyn Monroe is actually feeling as a human being. I always think of that scene in The Misfits, when Clark Gable tells Kay (the character Arthur Miller wrote for Monroe) people think she’s happy because that’s how she makes them feel when they’re around her).
I didn’t think the movie was that sad. Marilyn Monroe had a sad life. She was a deeply troubled person who came from a traumatic background, was abused by practically everyone she encountered, perhaps suffered from inherited mental illness (and definitely suffered from the looming specter of inherited mental illness), fought chronic insomnia and barbiturate dependence, and died at 36. (Accident? Suicide? Murder? Injection into her armpit by her psychiatrist? Nobody knows for sure except the person who murdered her.) (I do think she was probably murdered. I mean, her phone was being tapped by everyone in America. Anybody could have done it!)
If you’re ever feeling down about something that’s gone wrong in your own life, you can think, “Well, at least my life wasn’t as sad as Marilyn Monroe’s.”
I was in fifth grade when I walked down the stairs during Niagara and thought, “Who is that captivating woman–and why is he murdering her? ”I read every biography I could get my hands on, starting with Goddess by Anthony Summers. (When I purchased this at eleven, my grandma was horrified. Horrified. She despised Marilyn Monroe. For some reason, she thought if I read about her, she must be my role model. I would get so exasperated trying to make her understand that I was trying to learn about her, not become her.) (I remember her reading aloud pointedly from a supermarket tabloid, “Marilyn stopped accepting money for her favors but still continued to sleep with the men who wanted her.” Isn’t it weird tabloids were still writing about her in the early 90s? Slow news decade, I guess. When I said, “It would be worse to sleep with the men who didn’t want her,” my grandma did not find that funny at all.)
I do remember explaining to my mom and grandma, “No, listen, Marilyn Monroe was troubled. She wasn’t like bad people.” Then of course, that prompts the question, who are these “bad people” who do things only because they’re “bad”? (All eleven-year-olds should be required to read about Marilyn Monroe as an exercise in critical thinking.)
I remember reading about the studio sending Judy Garland to give her a pep talk (which itself is the saddest idea I’ve ever heard.) That anecdote has always stuck with me. She told Judy Garland she was scared. And Judy Garland replied, “I’m scared, too. We’re all scared Marilyn.” And I thought, “Oh no,” because I frequently got scared myself. It was this horrible revelation. Everybody else is just as scared as I am? Then why are they all so much better at hiding it? That still frustrates me. The more I’m unable to hide being scared, the more frustrated at myself I become.
This movie isn’t really a biopic (which is good since it feels more like a fanfic). It’s based on the novel Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. I don’t remember reading that, so I probably haven’t. (I won’t swear to it.) Marilyn Monroe’s biography is a bit tricky to sort out anyway. At this point, so many people have said they knew her/slept with her/were married to her/know who killed her. Even as a child, I found it difficult to sort out the reliable information from the confabulation. (It gets really tricky with Monroe. People will say they knew her intimately, and others back up those stories, but there are several groups of people who all back up each other’s stories. You’ll get five or six people all corroborating each other’s stories. Nobody outside that little circle knows those people are connected to Marilyn, but they don’t present themselves as a little circle. And then so many people say, “I knew her, but our relationship was a secret.” The thing is, they all could be telling the truth. She seems like a person who compartmentalized and showed radically different sides of herself to different people in different places in different phases of her life. And she dictated her own life story (at one point) to Ben Hecht, but then there is some evidence that details in that account might have been made up—by Marilyn herself (who might have thought she was telling the truth)! It’s hard to imagine anyone else who might have known so many people in just thirty-six years. Her death is very hard to parse—but the entire rest of her life is, too!
My daughter said in the car this afternoon, “I heard some people thought that movie insulted Marilyn Monroe’s memory.” It kind of does. If it presented itself as a biopic, it would be awful. As is, it’s pretty frustrating. I think Marilyn Monroe said once, “It’s a make believe world, isn’t it?” Her world was. It’s very hard to be sure of what’s true about her. (When she was young, she was a Christian Scientist, so that idea of reality being immaterial may have come from that tradition.) As the years pass, more and more people suddenly remember that they knew her intimately. She couldn’t escape the myth. (Well, maybe she did escape it. She’s dead. But we can’t escape it.)
The Good:
To me, the movie felt like a quick watch, and it wasn’t that sad (I mean, if you watch braced for sadness and have any inkling of what her life was like). It’s not…a terrible movie. It’s not bad exactly. I enjoyed it because of de Armas.
To my shock, Ana de Armas makes the best, most convincing Marilyn Monroe I’ve ever seen. The SAG nomination totally makes sense. She’s wonderful. Now, three qualifications here. 1) Nobody ever plays her right, so it’s not that much of an achievement to be the best one. 2) Her performance is inconsistent. She’s much better in some scenes than others. That may be because she’s playing Marilyn/Norma Jean differently. But it doesn’t seem to line up that way rigidly, so if she’s doing that, I’ve misunderstood what she’s attempting, and I need to watch again. (Maybe it’s subtle, you know. Like a word or topic triggers her, and she drifts into an altered persona. I’m not seeing clear evidence of that, but some scenes are so spot on that I’m willing to entertain the idea.) 3) She has a Cuban accent. It’s not subtle. It’s there 99 percent of the time. But apart from the accent, her cadence, phrasing, and pitch are spot on. (You’re probably asking, “How can her cadence be spot on if she has a Cuban accent?” I don’t know. But it is. To be fair, Marilyn herself has an unusual way of speaking. She sometimes sounds like she’s trying to mask a foreign accent. I’ve seen people blame her coach Natasha Lytess for that.)
If this were a silent film, de Armas would be completely convincing as Marilyn Monroe. When she’s auditioning for Don’t Bother to Knock (I film I used to love as a kid even though the performance is so strange), de Armas really nails Monroe’s facial movements—her lips, her eyes, twitches. She plays it as if she spent a year locked in a room studying tape of Marilyn Monroe performances. She really has those distinctive facial movements down. And she looks like her. I think she’s wearing colored contacts. But at times, she looks unbelievably like her. It helps that she’s wearing replica costumes from well-known films and photo shoots. (I have multiple coffee table books of Marilyn Monroe dressed up, plus paper dolls, and all these post cards. I used to have posters and post cards of her hung all over my room in junior high. So watching, I’m like, “Oh yeah. There’s that dress. And that one. She’s got her hair right there. I recognize that look also. Oh I know those pants…” (I have no technical vocabulary. I just had a lot of postcards.)
The costuming and make-up are spot on as far as Monroe’s concerned.
Don’t Bother to Knock is Anne Bancroft’s first movie. I loved the story she told about seeing Marilyn Monroe in the end, gazing on her, seeing something inside her, being so captivated. (I can’t remember her exact words, but as she was describing the moment, I was thinking, “Yeah, right? That’s how I felt, too. But I only saw her on a TV screen in Niagara!”)
Best Scene:
That Don’t Bother to Knock audition is one of my favorite scenes because that’s when I first realized how eerily spot on de Armas’s facial expressions were. But I also like the scene when Marilyn (or here, I guess, Norma Jean) explains Arthur Miller’s character to him. (By the way, Adrien Brody makes an unusually sympathetic Arthur Miller. I like Miller’s plays, but often he comes across as kind of a jerk in Marilyn Monroe biographies.)
One other moment that caught my attention was the scene on the bed with Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale). He’s watching a game. She’s complaining that real life is so much harder than acting because in real life, you never know the purpose of a scene or how long it’s supposed to go on. I related to what she was saying so much. Fiction is so much more comprehensible than reality.
Best Scene Visually:
This movie does a lot of weird stuff, and I’m not sure why. It constantly switches from color to black-and-white or shows us scenes from strange perspectives. My favorite thing it does visually is insert Ana de Armas into old Marilyn Monroe films while leaving the rest of the cast intact, so that she’s acting opposite Marilyn’s actual co-stars. I sort of like her confused lapse on the airplane. I really like the moment on the red carpet featuring all the men’s gaping, distorted mouths.
My least favorite moment visually is that second abortion. It’s a little unsettling, and I can’t understand the reason for it.
Best Action Sequence:
I like the sequence when she performs the subway scene live in New York, and then Joe DiMaggio gets angry and hits her afterwards—because that actually happened. (It is bizarre—the emphasis on her flesh, her body. The crowd did gather to see her skirt fly up, and those shots weren’t used in the movie. They were racier, for sure. But that’s not actually her appeal. She was viewed as a sex object by many people, but her enduring star power has nothing to do with her naked body. She projects some kind of weird, alluring energy.)
The Negatives:
I agree with the people who are saying stuff like, “Marilyn Monroe has been dead for sixty years. Why are we continuing to torture her?”
It’s hard not to watch this as a biopic even though it’s based on a novel. I would have preferred to see de Armas in an actual biopic of Monroe. I think Blonde gives a very false impression of her life, although I will concede 1) Giving a true impression of her life may be impossible and 2) I did not live her life, so I really don’t know.
Blonde gives us her life by skipping over all the events of her life. I do think it does some things well. Why her two well-known marriages failed is covered pretty well. Her brief marriage to Joe DiMaggio was turbulent and full of violent “misunderstandings.” She was not the kind of wife he expected. You get the gist of the problem watching this movie. And her marriage to Arthur Miller fell apart because 1) she kept miscarrying (when she wanted a baby so desperately), 2) she discovered he was writing about her. (Also she was unfaithful and on often on drugs, but those first two reasons are really the crux of it. I mean, if you ask me. Obviously, I was not involved in that marriage personally.)
Miller writing about her was such a massive betrayal. I think about this constantly as a writer (and a wife with mental health issues). I write about people all the time. I do write about everyone I know. But not like that! When you’re married to one of the most famous women in the world, how can you in good conscience write plays about things she tells you in confidence? Everyone will know he’s writing about her. Plus…man. I do write about my friends, my family. But I tell my secrets in my writing, not theirs. I tell my deepest truth, not other people’s! I cannot imagine my husband confiding to me, “Now here is my darkest secret…” and then me turning around and cranking out the best seller My Husband’s Darkest Secret: The Novel. I’m working on non-fiction now, and that makes me so nervous as it is because I’m a participant in the story myself, but I might want a level of things told about me that others don’t want told about them.
I’ve had a turbulent couple of years emotionally, and I confide in my husband constantly. I would not want him to turn around and write a novel about that—because that’s what my novel’s about! I would kill him!
I’m pretty sure the Cass and Eddy throuple is way more fiction than fact. I really don’t like that the movie makes it look like they’re the only people she dated. That’s very bizarre. You watch and come away with the impression that one of Marilyn Monroe’s most significant relationships was with Charlie Chaplin, Jr., and that doesn’t ring true. That seems very unlikely to me. Plus, she dated so many people. (Just ask my grandma!) And she had multiple abortions and miscarriages, not just one of each. Her weird baby telepathy powers are a little strange, too. I mean, in fairness, I did talk to all of my children when they were in the womb (well except our oldest since I’m not his biological mother and didn’t even know my husband then. His ex-wife has always been very friendly to me, but I’m sure she wouldn’t have been if I’d begun our relationship by whispering to her pregnant belly before we were introduced). But when Marilyn does it in this movie, we get these strange images of the baby like it’s the end of 2001 or “The Diary of an Unborn Child.”
But see, it’s hard to fault the movie for what it shows because it’s based on a novel. It’s not a biopic in the truest sense.
It is true that not being able to have a baby was a huge, traumatic aspect of Marilyn Monroe’s life, a driving force of her later years. It is nice to see her difficulty on set contextualized in that way. As a kid, I read all about her miscarriages, and her guilt and worry that her previous abortions might have been the problem. But the full force of that didn’t register for me.
Marilyn Monroe did some cool stuff. I mean, she did tons of cool stuff. Not every moment of her life was tragedy. Also, why manufacture traumatic events when real traumatic events are available? (I guess my complaint is with the novel there.) I mean, we get an unusual degree of emphasis on her mentally ill mother. Why not also show when she was committed herself? (She did react well to that.) If you’re going to show her struggles, there are plenty of well documented ones that actually happened.
Weirdly, it doesn’t really bother me that de Armas speaks with a Cuban accent. She’s a good Marilyn Monroe. It’s kind of like watching an American or British actor play someone from a foreign country, but in English. I saw Alec Guinness play Hitler around the same time that I was first watching Marilyn Monroe’s movies. (I was also obsessed with Hitler at that time, again, not because I wanted to be like him.) Guinness was great as Hitler, and he didn’t try to sound German at all. It’s kind of like that with Ana de Armas. She sounds a little Cuban, but you just overlook that.
I’m not sure why she needs to be topless so much. She is Marilyn Monroe, yes. But (this is a little known fact) Marilyn Monroe also wore clothes.
Well…you know what? She did prefer to be naked, and she rarely wore underwear (although I’ve read that she slept in a bra). As long as it’s NC-17, they should have shown Marilyn always wearing a bra and never wearing underwear. That would have been truer to the character.
I’m torn. Most of what I want to complain about is that the plot’s a little thin, but I guess that is what the novel’s like. (I haven’t read it.) But this movie gives you the impression that Marilyn Monroe was raped by almost everyone, that other than her two famous husbands, she only had sex voluntarily with these two guys at once. That’s just not true. Also she had friends. She had so many friends. And pets. And employees. And hobbies.
The idea that she got famous just because Daryl F. Zanuck raped her once is very misleading, too. She consensually slept with many people on her path to stardom. I’m not saying nobody raped her. (And I don’t think I’ve ever read anything positive about Zanuck.) But she had many consensual relationships that she hoped would advance her career. I’m sure she didn’t sleep with all the people who claimed they’ve had sex with her (because for some reason, random weirdos are still turning up claiming they slept with her). But she did have a lot of sex, and she did not always view it in a negative light. In fact, based on her own words, she usually didn’t. It’s wildly inaccurate to portray her as a nymphomaniac. (If you listen to her own words, sex is more about closeness than physical pleasure). But it’s just as false to say that most of her sexual encounters were non-consensual.
Those JFK related scenes must be why the movie is NC-17, just for general unsavoriness, I guess. There was so much more going on in her life near its end than just that, and…See, her relationship with JFK is shrouded in mystery, so I guess it can be whatever you want, but why would anyone want it to be that?
Her tortured obsession with her mysterious absent father (who looked a little like Clark Gable) is well documented, but…isn’t suicide (or murder) bad enough without having this pointed reason for it that’s just made up? I don’t think her reason for wanting to end her life was that pat. (In fact, I do think she was most likely murdered, not that my opinion counts. This movie makes it look like she was psychologically tortured to death. I realize it’s fiction, but her real death was bad enough. And—how do I put this?—it feels disrespectful to suicide victims to create a fake scenario this neat that drives someone to suicide. It’s hard to explain what I mean. When someone murdered Adrienne Shelly and then tried to make it look like suicide, I found that so repugnant. This is similarly irritating, but not to the same degree. This simple, fictitious motive for suicide seems disrespectful since her death was not so neat, and most people kill themselves for reasons that are more complex. I just don’t know how to explain what I mean, but it feels like suicide porn (the way you have torture porn or poverty porn). It’s kind of gross.
Overall:
Ana de Armas deserves the SAG nomination for playing Marilyn Monroe. She’s the best part of a movie that is entertaining, but ultimately feels a bit empty. For me, the problem is that it’s a fictional take on Monroe’s life. It conveys the emotional beats of her story and themes that arose in her life, but it cuts out all the facts and events. If you watch only this, you’ll come away with the impression that Marilyn Monroe had feelings, but she never did anything! Also she only knew like five people, and two of them raped her. De Armas is an above average Marilyn Monroe, but there’s something empty and inadequate about the story.