Blonde (2022) review

My immediate reaction to Blonde was that I didn't hate it as much as everyone else seemed to, but I knew right away that something about it was very wrong. And weird. Like really, really weird. It is probably the weirdest movie of the year. It’s extremely ambitious, grandiose and intricately crafted, but at the same time it’s terrible, bloated and boring. Jumping over the line between artful and pretentious every single moment in its nearly 3-hour runtime, Blonde barely functions as a biopic about Marilyn Monroe and more as a demented portrait of the idea of her that we all have of her culturally. In concept that could be an interesting angle to take, but that does not feel like the intention of the film. It feels closer to a more polished version of David Lynch’s Inland Empire than an actual story about a real-life person, somehow feeling even uglier than that movie.

So much of this movie is so self-evidently obnoxious that it almost feels like a waste of time to write it out. CGI fetuses (yes, plural), said fetuses literally talking to Marilyn and begging not to be aborted, laughably edited sex scenes and threesomes, the extremely pretentious, trying-to-be-Tarkovsky switches between black-and-white and color, hilarious graphic matches during sex scenes and waterfalls, the list could go on forever.

In isolation, there are some interesting, unique and admirable moments of filmmaking in Blonde, like some of the non-literal visual representations of what Norma Jeane is going through mentally, but they only come across that way outside of the context of the film. None of it really feeds into itself or feels like one sequence informs the next, the film just meanders from one slightly impressive visual spectacle to the next. Andrew Dominik is a director that has made many critically acclaimed movies in the past, but his direction in Blonde feels like it is insisting upon its own importance, feeling more haphazard and pretentious than like a cohesive experience. For example, night-vision sequence and subsequent abortion scene wasn't poorly executed at all, it was actually pretty effective if I'm honest, but the decision to have the scene filmed like that does nothing for the overall film. So instead of feeling the desired feeling of fear and loss, I felt more like an "...alright."

Ana de Armas as Norma Jeane aka Marilyn Monroe wasn’t bad, but the script gives her very little to work with, making her character and performance come across extremely one-note and monotonous, making the 167 minutes spent with her feel even longer. The movie attempts to show the hardships and abuse she suffered in her life, but that is all the movie bothers to show, throwing nothing but constant torment at the character for 3 hours as if attempting to guilt the viewer into feeling sympathy. And in that regard, it succeeds in the same way that something like The Passion of the Christ does, where it is capable of getting the intended emotions out of the viewer, not due to the character writing or development of the story, but solely gets by on the fact that it can substitute what the viewer already feels about the given character for actual storytelling.

While movies about historical figures obviously cannot be completely historically accurate, nor do I think they must attempt to be (for example, Amadeus and Ed Wood have little basis in the reality they are based upon but they both go hard as fuck), the subject matter at hand in Blonde requires more care and empathy than was given, making the whole project ironic and kind of gross. Right after watching Blonde, I didn't hate it as much as everyone else was, but the longer it sits with me, the worse and worse it gets.