movie reviews of blonde

‘Blonde’ Review: Ana de Armas Does Just What You Want — She Becomes Marilyn Monroe — in Andrew Dominik’s Flawed but Haunting Biopic

It captures how not just Marilyn's tragedy but her sex-goddess glory emerged from her trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga Star in a Cracked Jukebox Musical — but It Doesn’t Let Joker Be Joker Enough 3 days ago
• ‘Queer’ Review: Daniel Craig Shows a Whole New Side in Luca Guadagnino’s Bold and Trippy Adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Ahead-of-Its-Time Novel 4 days ago
• ‘The Room Next Door’ Review: Tilda Swinton Gives a Monumental Performance as a Woman Confronting Death in Pedro Almodóvar’s First English-Language Drama 5 days ago

A good biopic invites the audience to experience, from the inside out, who the subject really was. That’s the level that “ Blonde ,” Andrew Dominik ’s film about Marilyn Monroe, operates on for most of its 2 hours and 46 minutes. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel, the movie is a hushed and floating psychodramatic klieg-light fantasia, shot in color and black-and-white, that presents a fusion of reality and fiction. But most of it is torn from reality.

Related Stories

Summer Box Office Success Stories Weren’t Just Tentpoles

Emayatzy Corinealdi and Morris Chestnut Lead a Soapy and Intense ‘Reasonable Doubt’ Season 2: TV Review

Popular on variety.

Ah, but what of the endlessly discussed Cuban Accent Question? I would hardly say that de Armas, who is a native of Cuba, plays Marilyn with a Cuban accent, but there are moments, beneath her pitch-perfect impersonation of the Monroe baby-doll-lolling-on-cashmere sound, when you hear the flicker, the echo of a Cuban inflection, which I would liken to the way that actors like Gary Oldman or Anthony Hopkins, in performances as Americans, will let a tinge of their English or Welsh elocution through. No one makes a big deal of it. And it’s no big deal here, because from that dreamy-candy singsong voice on down, de Armas channels Marilyn with a conviction that’s melancholy and arresting.

Onscreen, what made Marilyn the icon of the century, apart from the singular glow of her beauty, is that she made the expression of pure carnality seem nurturing. That’s why people went nuts for her. What we see in “Blonde” is a Marilyn who bathes her allure in the warmest shades of temptation, but in private, where most of the film takes place, that legendary come-on is cut with a sadness, a hint of despair, that sits over her like an invisible cloud. It’s ever-present, even in the “happy” scenes and even when it doesn’t speak its name.

In “Blonde,” we perceive something that’s often said about Marilyn but seldom understood: that the greatest character she ever created was…Marilyn Monroe. It’s true. That’s why she was a superb actress even though she was no Vivien Leigh. On a movie set, or at the Actors’ Studio, she was not in command of what you would call “technique.” But that’s because her technique — her Method, as it were — was already fully at play in her creation of Marilyn. And what “Blonde” lays bare is the tragic paradox of that: that onscreen, in public, performing for her audience or for her sundry “daddies,” the Marilyn persona was as sweet and delicious as a sundae, but offscreen, in its delicately melting, arrested, meant-to-reassure quality, it was an expression of trauma. What we’re seeing in “Blonde” is the story of a woman who was so damaged as a child, and such a figure of teasing enticement to the world at large, that she grew up by refusing to allow herself to grow up.

The movie then cuts to a dazzling Marilyn montage set to “Everybody Needs a Da Da Daddy,” the startling confessional torch song she performed in “Ladies of the Chorus,” and to 1950, when Marilyn is auditioning for the role she got in “All About Eve.” Her audition consists of reading from the script in Darryl Zanuck’s office until Zanuck, the head of Fox, comes up behind her, forces her down, and violates her from behind. The moment, we’re given to understand, represents a dozen others like it, but while the casting couch isn’t news, the drama here is in seeing Marilyn’s special navigation of the toxicity of Hollywood’s harassment-meets-sugar-daddy culture. She is so possessed by her lack of a daddy, with such a hidden hole in her soul, that she’s able to experience even the most corrosive and exploitative sexual encounter as a twisted form of “acceptance.”

At the same time, she’s working the only system there was in Hollywood. She’s not a masochist; she’s using these men as much as they use her. She’s also a woman of healthy eroticism who’s able to treat sex as sport. We see this in the first of the film’s extended episodes, which is also the most problematic. At an L.A. actors’ society, Marilyn walks into a room that’s empty except for the presence of two flirtatious young men, who seduce her in unison. One (Xavier Samuel) is the son of Charlie Chaplin; the other (Garret Dillahunt) is the son of Edward G. Robinson. They’re dissolute Hollywood party boys, and for a while they and Marilyn become a walking ménage à trois — which is startling, because it communicates something that too many people today, even those who work in entertainment media, never seem to grasp: that the people in the movie industry have always led far wilder lives than even the tabloid gossip grapevine allows.

Monroe did, in fact, date Charlie Chaplin Jr., and this mostly invented episode stands in for her unabashed willingness simply to play around (she’s not using her relationship with these two for leverage). But why did Dominik, who wrote and directed the film, insist on portraying the two look-alike playboys as if they were contempo porn stars who act like incestuous siblings? It’s just too unreal. And it jars.

The fascination of how Dominik stages it is that even before DiMaggio has revealed that he can’t handle being married to a sex symbol, we see how distant Marilyn is from him, and from life itself, within the cocoon of their marriage. His relatives come over, and she doesn’t know how to have a normal conversation. You could call it shyness, but it’s really something else — a kind of personality disorder that seals Marilyn, for all her warmth and charm, into a bubble of bubbleheaded solipsism. It’s a running joke that no one can believe she reads books, but we can, because the Marilyn we see is more believable as a bookworm than she is as a companion. She’s adorable and intelligent (as she has always been described by those who knew her), but she’s also an overgrown child who can’t crawl out of herself.

Her relationship with Arthur Miller crashes and burns in a different way. Adrien Brody plays him with the right touch of Brooklyn diffidence, and while he’s kind, on the surface, to Marilyn, he lies to her about using her in his writing (which is just what happened), and after she becomes pregnant, there’s a terrible scene on the beach where she trips and miscarries. Marilyn’s persistent inability to become a mother was probably the key factor in her downfall, and there’s an episode in “Blonde” that deals with it in a possibly fictionalized but resonantly disturbing way. I say “possibly” because what happens is that a movie studio forces her to undergo an abortion, and while Dominik stages it like a scene out of a shock-corridor horror film, it’s quite reflective of what went on in Hollywood during the ’40s and ’50s. This happened all the time. It could well have happened to Marilyn (though we don’t know).

It’s while her relationship to Miller is crumbling that Marilyn herself, for the first time, begins to fall apart. On the set of “Some Like It Hot,” she flies into a volcanic rage at the line “She’s just like Jell-O on springs,” feeling the primal-gaze insult of it — but it’s no different than the lines that have been written about her before. What’s changed is that it’s now the late ’50s, Marilyn has been a star for a decade, and she’s waking up to the full trap of what she, and other women, endure.

The film then leaps ahead to 1962 and the affair she is carrying on with JFK. The scene Dominik stages with Marilyn and the president (Caspar Phillipson) is relatively brief and, in its way, dark and devastating. He treats her as his whore — as a utensil. And when she imagines their sexual encounter as a scene out of one of her movies, it’s an extraordinary, audacious moment of filmmaking. Yet I still wish that the scene had played out with greater complexity. Marilyn and JFK had, in fact, been sexually involved going back to the early ’50s, when they had a companionship, and if we could have seen a glimmer of that it might have brought “Blonde” to a more arresting place.

Of course, the most glorious of those images was Marilyn herself. She was not a real blonde. She was not (or not quite) the angelic voluptuous pinup cuddlebug she played onscreen. Yet “Blonde,” flaws and all, reveals how the myth of Marilyn Monroe was built on top of who she was inside — a trauma of need so intense that she transformed herself into the greatest image of the power of beauty in the 20th century. The film leaves us with just how haunting it is that where the world saw a goddess, she saw no there there.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 8, 2022. MPA rating: NC-17. Running time: 166 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Plan B Entertainment production. Producers: Andrew Dominik, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Tracey Landon, Scott Robertson. Executive producer: Christine Oh.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Andrew Dominik. Camera: Chayse Irvin. Editor: Adam Robinson. Music: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis.
• With: Ana de Armas, Adrien Brody, Bobby Cannavale, Xavier Samuel, Julianne Nicholson, Garret Dillahunt, Toby Huss, Caspar Phillipson.  

More from Variety

Viral TikTok Series ‘Who TF Did I Marry?’ Gets TV Adaptation, Natasha Rothwell to Star and Produce (EXCLUSIVE)

Disney’s Theme Parks Problem Is a Monster of Its Own Making

Paris Olympics Racked Up Over 1.3 Million Posts on TikTok, a 1,828% Increase on Tokyo Games

Arte Distribution Dazzles Buyers in Le Havre With Ancient History, Hollywood Icons, Hot-Button Topics

Reality TV Survived the ’07 Writers Strike. Why Is It Hurting in 2024?

‘Demure’ Content Creator Can Pay for Gender Transition After the Trend Goes Viral: ‘TikTok Has Changed My Life’

More from our brands, t.i. testifies at $25 million omg girlz trial: ‘anyone with eyes can see’ alleged theft.

Can I Send This Wine Back? Yes, Here’s How.

Ravens, Chiefs Draw 23-Year Ratings High in Blockbuster NFL Opener

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Disney+’s Vision Series Adds Star Trek Vet Todd Stashwick to Cast

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Movie Reviews

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

'Blonde,' the new Marilyn Monroe biopic, is an exercise in exploitation, not empathy

Justin Chang

Ana de Armas plays Marilyn Monroe in the Netflix film Blonde . Netflix hide caption

Ana de Armas plays Marilyn Monroe in the Netflix film Blonde .

In her New York Times pan of Norman Mailer's 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe, the critic Pauline Kael wrote, "I wish they'd let her die." I had much the same thought after watching Blonde , which focuses so narrowly on Monroe's pain and trauma that it feels less like a biographical drama than a passion play.

The movie turns Monroe into an avatar of suffering, brought low by a miserable childhood, a father she never knew and an industry full of men who abused and exploited her until her death in 1962, at the age of 36. There's truth to that story, of course, but it's hardly the only truth that can be drawn from Monroe's tough life and extraordinary career. It's also an awfully tedious note to keep hitting for nearly three hours.

For all that, I came away from Blonde with great admiration for Ana de Armas and her commitment to the role of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who would become known all over the world as Marilyn Monroe. I felt even more admiration for Joyce Carol Oates' novel , which freely reshapes and reinvents details from Monroe's life, but offers a much more nuanced and expansive view of its subject than the writer-director Andrew Dominik manages.

'Reframed' revisits Marilyn Monroe's life and legacy, from an all-women point of view

The movie feels off from the start as it whisks us through Norma Jeane's difficult upbringing in 1930s Los Angeles. We meet her volatile mother, Gladys — a fierce Julianne Nicholson — who's diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized when Norma Jeane is still a child. Blonde skips over a lot of details, including Norma Jeane's time in foster care and her first marriage, and fast-forwards to her experience as a pin-up model, which leads to her start in motion pictures.

De Armas' transformation into Monroe goes well beyond a breathy whisper and a peroxide dye job; she plays up Norma Jeane's kindness and her naive, unassuming nature. That leaves her ill prepared for an industry that degrades her from the get-go, starting with a Hollywood mogul who rapes her in his office at their first meeting.

Everyone she works with is condescending to her, even though she's much harder-working and more intellectually curious about her material than anyone gives her credit for. She also maintains ties with her mother, visiting her in the hospital and asking about the identity of her father, who, she's been led to believe, was a famous Hollywood actor himself.

Pop Culture

Giant marilyn monroe statue returns to palm springs, but its backside faces backlash.

According to Blonde , Norma Jeane's persistent daddy issues are to blame for her string of bad romances, starting with a bizarre and wholly fictional threesome with two hunky Hollywood descendants, Charlie Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr. And then there are her famously ill-fated marriages to Joe DiMaggio, played by Bobby Cannavale, and Arthur Miller, played by Adrien Brody .

Along the way, she has multiple pregnancies, and there are graphic depictions of Norma Jeane having an abortion and, later, a miscarriage. Blonde suggests that Monroe desperately wanted a child, to become the loving, supportive mother she herself never had. But it depicts this desire in a way that's frankly ridiculous: The movie keeps flashing back to closeups of a fetus in Norma Jeane's womb, shimmering like the Star Child from 2001 .

Monroe's Legacy Is Making Fortune, But For Whom?

Dominik has always been an artful filmmaker, and Blonde is full of lustrous images, shot in a mix of color and black-and-white, that sometimes beautifully evoke vintage Monroe photographs. And it has brooding music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, who also scored the director's great 2007 western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Like that film, Blonde feels like a slow-motion death march: It's The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Basically Everyone She Ever Met . There are fleeting moments of joy and lightness along the way, especially when de Armas re-enacts bits of Monroe's famous performances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot . But even when Dominik recreates these classic Hollywood moments, he's quick to cancel out our pleasure: Even the famous subway-grate sequence from The Seven Year Itch has to be stretched into a crushing lament for how endlessly brutalized this woman was.

These are the new movies and TV shows we can't wait to watch this fall

Blonde clearly wants us to feel for Norma Jeane, but it dwells on her pain so obsessively — never more so than when she's shown being sexually assaulted by President Kennedy — that the movie's empathy feels like another form of exploitation. Marilyn Monroe may have been a glossy Hollywood construct, one that Norma Jeane herself had a hand in creating. But Blonde is too thuddingly repetitive — and finally, unimaginative — to bring us any closer to understanding the woman behind that construct. It left me feeling that Monroe deserved better, not just from the industry that chewed her up and spat her out, but from any filmmaker hoping to make sense of her legacy.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake

She was an actress of uncommon talent. But once again a director is more interested in examining her body (literally, in this case) than getting inside her mind.

• Share full article

By Manohla Dargis

Given all the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured during her 36 years — her family tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster homes, spells of poverty, unworthy film roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering attention of insatiable fans — it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities of “Blonde,” the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.

Hollywood has always eaten its own, including its dead. Given that the industry has also always loved making movies about its own machinery, it’s no surprise that it also likes making movies about its victims and martyrs. Three years ago in the biopic “Judy,” Renée Zellweger played Judy Garland near the end of her troubled life. “Blonde” goes for a more comprehensive biopic sweep — it runs nearly three hours — embracing a bleakly familiar trajectory that begins with Monroe’s unhappy childhood, revisits her dazzling yet progressively fraught fame, her depressingly abusive relationships, myriad health issues and catastrophic downward spiral.

After a brief prelude that introduces Marilyn at the height of her fame, the movie rewinds to the sad, lonely little girl named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Childhood is a horror show — Gladys is cold, violent — but Norma Jeane crawls into adulthood (a fine if overwhelmed Ana de Armas). She models for cheesecake magazines, and before long breaks into the film industry, which is another nightmare. Soon after she steps onto a lot, she is raped by a man, here called Mr. Z and seemingly based on Darryl F. Zanuck, the longtime head of 20th Century Fox studio, where Monroe became a star.

“Blonde” is based on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates hefty (the original hardback is 738 pages) fictionalized account of Monroe’s life. In the novel, Oates draws from the historical record but likewise plays with facts. She cooks up a ménage a trois for Monroe and channels her ostensible thoughts, including during a lurid tryst with an unkind President John F. Kennedy. In the introduction to the book, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A woman, Showalter later adds without much conviction, “who was much more than a victim.”

The writer-director of “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik, doesn’t seem to have read that part about Monroe. His Norma Jeane — and her glamorous, vexed creation, Marilyn Monroe — is almost nothing more than a victim: As the years pass and even as her fame grows, she is mistreated again and again, even by those who claim to love her. Prey for leering men and a curiosity for smirking women (unlike Monroe, this Marilyn has no women friends), she is aware of her effect on others but also helpless to do, well, anything. With her tremulous smile, she drifts and stumbles through a life that never feels like her own.

All that’s missing from this portrait is, well, everything else, including Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in — and knowledge of — politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions. (As Anthony Summers points out in his book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” she formed her own corporation: Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.) Mostly, what’s missing is any sense of what made Monroe more than just another beautiful woman in Hollywood: her genius. Watching “Blonde,” I wondered if Dominik had ever actually watched a Marilyn Monroe film, had seen the transcendent talent, the brilliant comic timing, the phrasing, gestures and grace?

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 77% Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Link to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
• 94% Rebel Ridge Link to Rebel Ridge
• 100% His Three Daughters Link to His Three Daughters

New TV Tonight

• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4
• 97% English Teacher: Season 1
• 92% Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist: Season 1
• 100% Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos: Season 1
• 54% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
• -- Tell Me Lies: Season 2
• -- Outlast: Season 2
• -- The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Season 1
• -- Selling Sunset: Season 8
• -- Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Season 14

Most Popular TV on RT

• 74% Kaos: Season 1
• 83% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 89% Terminator Zero: Season 1
• 100% Dark Winds: Season 2
• 93% Bad Monkey: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4 Link to Slow Horses: Season 4
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Best TV Shows of 2024: Best New Series to Watch Now

All Tim Burton Movies Ranked

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Cast on Reuniting with Tim Burton

New Movies and TV Shows Streaming in September 2024: What to Watch on Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Max and more

• Trending on RT
• Beetlejuice Beetlejuice First Reviews
• Top 10 Box Office
• Toronto Film Festival
• Popular Series on Netflix

Blonde Reviews

Where many biopics have become generalized, surface-level projects that essentially all go down the same checklist, Blonde takes on a completely unique and arguably camp approach to this genre.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2024

Just leave Marilyn alone already.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 3, 2024

It’s a literal descent through madness, brought on by a system and society that builds up individuals only to spit them out the other side.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Oct 31, 2023

Ana de Armas is scintillating in a film that tells the story of pop-culture icon Marilyn Monroe, but Blonde hardly explores who Norma Jeane truly is behind her on-screen avatar.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

ll the technical elements are remarkable, from cinematography to production design and score. But that the film works at all is down to the extraordinary performance at the heart of it: Ana de Armas carries the film squarely on her shoulders.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2023

Blonde has a problem separating the truth from fiction. It is marred with nightmare sequences close to paranoia rather than reality.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

For all that the film works on a technical level, on a performance level and on a visceral level, it is, frankly, far too one-note and far too... empty to justify its quite punishing 167-minute run time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 31, 2023

Blonde’s near-obsession with showing varied abuses of Norma serves no purpose other than to exploit the actual traumas of this young woman.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

"There’s an overall dismissiveness towards both Monroe and Oates’s complex and infuriating novel that makes the film sit uneasily."

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 28, 2023

Director Andrew Dominik's use of dramatic jumps in time, blending of color and black-and-white sequences, and a deranged screenplay at the heart of it all makes Blonde less of a biopic and more of a self-indulgent fable.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Displaying the tragedy of Marilynn Monroe. In some ways a horror movie & others a slog of a film that never really finds its footing. Ana De Armas is incredible & the cinematography is mesmerizing but I never found myself fully engaged

Marilyn’s ghost was haunting Ana de Armas for a reason.

[Blonde will] not only send you down the rabbit hole of stories circling Monroe and get you to watch her films but also make you wonder about the entertainment industry and the media-consuming populace.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 20, 2023

It puts the audience in a Twilight Zone-esque state for almost three hours, where you can’t escape or tune off.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 19, 2023

The cruelty seems to be the point of "Blonde," which makes a meandering three-hour movie a tough sell.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 16, 2023

"Blonde" is too caught up in its creator’s notion of Norma Jeane, forgetting there was also a person underneath who sometimes functioned and who gave us indelible performances that touched something beyond carnality.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

Ultimately, it's de Armas who makes Blonde palatable through the rough spots. From one angle, she's made up to be the spitting image of Ms. Monroe, at least the way she looked on the red carpet or when she was ready for her close-up.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

By then it is impossible to tell if the confused Dominik is attacking masculinity, Hollywood, and America, or if the film is a howl of revulsion at the existence of women.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

As it stands everything was done for style, for the look of it, to exist as a living reel of Dominick’s talents. None of it serves to show Marilyn as anything more than a victim.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 15, 2023

It's an O.K. movie, despite its faults, but I think I would have rather seen more of the real Norma Jeane and less of the sad, exploited victim.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Feb 1, 2023

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. The story of American actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives.

• Andrew Dominik
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Ana de Armas
• Lily Fisher
• Julianne Nicholson
• 1.1K User reviews
• 496 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore
• 12 wins & 36 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Norma Jeane

• Young Norma Jeane

• Norma Jeane's Father

• Deputy Will Bonnie

• Uncle Clive

• Marilyn Singing Voice

• Joe (Photo Shoot Photographer)

• Acting Coach

• Eddy Robinson Jr.

• Cass Chaplin

• Casting Director
• Assistant to Director

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia This film is based on the 2000 novel "Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates , which is a fictionalized account inspired by the life of Marilyn Monroe , not an actual biography. Oates insisted that the novel is a work of fiction that should not be regarded as a biography. Oates said that she didn't have anything to do with the making of this film, though once in a while, director Andrew Dominik would get in contact with her, and that she was given an almost-final cut in 2020 and she has praised the film ever since. The novel had been previously adapted into a two-part miniseries: Blonde (2001) , starring Poppy Montgomery as Monroe.
• Goofs Marilyn greets the Secret Service agents at her door with: "You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa ?" Mother Teresa had not gained international recognition in 1962. It's highly doubtful Marilyn would have known who she was.

Norma Jeane : Marilyn doesn't exist. When I come out of my dressing room, I'm Norma Jeane. I'm still her when the camera is rolling. Marilyn Monroe only exists on the screen.

• Connections Featured in How Fight Scene Props Are Made for Movies & TV (2022)
• Soundtracks Ev'ry Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy Written by Lester Lee and Allan Roberts

User reviews 1.1K

• Sep 23, 2022
• How long is Blonde? Powered by Alexa
• Is this film a biography?
• September 28, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Netflix
• Los Angeles Theatre - 615 S. Broadway, Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA ("Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" premiere)
• Plan B Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $22,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 47 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• IMDb Answers: Help fill gaps in our data
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

‘blonde’ review: ana de armas’ haunted marilyn monroe drowns in the excesses of andrew dominik’s woozy reflection on celebrity.

Adrien Brody plays Arthur Miller and Bobby Cannavale is Joe DiMaggio in this Netflix adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel fusing fact and fiction, premiering in the Venice competition.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Send an Email
• Show additional share options
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Tumblr
• Share on Whats App
• Print the Article
• Post a Comment

Related Stories

'april' review: a doctor dispenses off-the-books abortions in miraculous, wrenching georgian drama, netflix's 'mr. mcmahon' trailer explores the blurred lines of reality behind the wrestling mogul.

The nagging feeling arises that in the rumored struggle between Netflix and Dominik to chisel the long-gestating project down to size, it might have benefited everyone had the director not prevailed. This is a work of such wild excesses and questionable cruelty that it leaves you wondering how many more times and in how many more creative ways are we going to keep torturing, degrading and killing this abused woman.

To get one point out of the way, the vultures who seized upon an early teaser trailer to attack the lack of authenticity in Cuban actress de Armas playing Monroe need to back off. Any quibbles about accent are beside the point, especially since her voice work is more than creditable enough. This is a freewheeling fever-dream interpretation of an iconic Hollywood creation, not a slavish facsimile.

De Armas is creating a character just as Dominik’s script has Norma Jeane create a character — in the latter case as an Actors Studio exercise, drawing a circle of light that contains an alternate self to be carried with her wherever she goes. That motif gets a bit overworked as Marilyn interrogates herself about which one of them is real, though that’s no fault of the very game de Armas.

Just in case it wasn’t sleazy enough, Dominik has Marilyn delivered and removed from the unnamed president’s hotel suite like a sack of meat by secret service agents; she’s alarmed but barely conscious following a cross-country flight zonked out on pills and champagne. Without even a hello, the Pres then motions her to get busy on his penis while he’s stuck on a call about sexual misconduct allegations. “Don’t let me throw up,” she thinks. You might feel the same.

The opening wastes no time setting up the psychological through-line of the absent father figure. On her birthday, the young Norma Jeane’s unbalanced mother (Julianne Nicholson) drags her into the bedroom where she slept in a drawer as a baby and points to a framed photo on the wall, telling the child her father is a Hollywood big shot whose identity must be kept under wraps. Her mother also makes it clear Norma Jeane was unwanted, at one point attempting to drown her in the bathtub. The girl is offloaded onto neighbors when her mother is hospitalized, eventually winding up in an orphanage.

Her teen years and early 20s are a montage of magazine shoots and pinups, including calendar nudes. Monroe’s early film experiences are conflated, making her first screen role her brief but memorable appearance in All About Eve , a part secured by submitting to rape in the office of Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck (David Warshofsky).

Here and elsewhere, clips from films including Niagara , The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot are integrated by editor Adam Robinson into a collage-like visual approach that switches somewhat randomly between B&W and color and between shifting aspect ratios.

One of Oates’ most bizarre fictional detours is a threeway relationship with Cass (Xavier Samuels) and Eddie (Evan Williams), the jaded offspring of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson, respectively. Both describe themselves as the sons of men who never wanted them, establishing an affinity with Marilyn, not that it’s played for poignancy.

Dominik instead presents their sexually charged interlude like a Herb Ritts photo shoot, landing Marilyn on tabloid covers and on an operating table for a studio-arranged abortion just as her career is taking off. That ordeal also prompts the introduction of a fetus-cam, an unfortunate device used to explore her unfulfilled longing for a child in the least subtle way possible.

Later, she’s repulsed while watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , launching into an inner monologue with her unborn child: “You killed your baby for this?” she asks. “That thing up on the screen, it’s not you.” The script’s overly simplistic Freudian personality split is only marginally less obvious than the reproachful voice that keeps piping up from the womb. Yeesh.

Much of this is fairly standard hell-of-celebrity observation, seldom far from cliché, albeit with the seductive imagery of a gifted visual storyteller. (Dominik works here with DP Chayse Irvin, best known for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and Beyoncé’s Lemonade .) The film actually becomes more emotionally engaging when it lingers over straight biographical chapters.

Those include Marilyn’s stormy marriage to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ), identified as “the former athlete,” who’s uncomfortable with her fame far eclipsing his. He loses his cool and gets violent over the Seven Year Itch subway-grate scene, when delighted crowds gather to watch cameras capture her skirt blowing up in the breeze.

Better yet is Marilyn’s flight from the pressures of Hollywood in the mid 1950s, seeking refuge in New York theater, where she meets “The Playwright,” Arthur Miller ( Adrien Brody , the best of the supporting cast). It’s here that Dominik briefly pays attention to the vulnerable human being at the center of the hallucinatory, hypersexualized circus. Miller becomes for a time one of the few men called “Daddy” who acknowledges that she has a brain, and their time away from the spotlight in Connecticut represents a reprieve in her life. But a miscarriage pushes her over the edge again.

While he skips the conspiracy theories surrounding Monroe’s death, Dominik dips into the surveillance period when her dalliances with the Kennedys put her on the national security radar. But like most everything else in Blonde , the writer-director plays with the lines separating truth from paranoia, reality from addled nightmare. The nerve-jangling sounds of phones cranked up to high volume and the constant haze of semi-consciousness push the film into sensationalized psychosexual trauma porn, steadily robbing the protagonist of all dignity.

The tragic dimension of a woman adored by the world, devoured by Hollywood and ultimately abandoned to her own despair in an ordinary little house in Brentwood resonates because we know Marilyn’s sad story. But it’s hard to ignore the queasy feeling that Dominik is getting off on the tawdry spectacle. De Armas holds nothing back in connecting with the character’s pain. She deserves better.

Full credits

Thr newsletters.

Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Ontario’s behind-the-camera talent boom sparks hollywood collaborations with global impact, ‘unstoppable’ review: jharrel jerome and jennifer lopez bring grit and determination to conventional but crowd-pleasing sports bio, elton john talks fame, family and coming out: “i was being honest”  , toronto: ‘unstoppable’ and ‘we live in time’ both very moving, but face uphill awards climbs, toronto fest embraces mike leigh’s ‘hard truths’, ‘hard truths’ review: marianne jean-baptiste delivers a virtuosic turn in mike leigh’s searing study of a woman at war with the world.

• Stranger Things Season 5
• Deadpool and Wolverine
• The Batman 2
• Spider-Man 4
• Yellowstone Season 6
• Fallout Season 2
• The Last of Us Season 2
• Entertainment

Blonde review: a striking and tough Marilyn Monroe biopic

Andrew Dominik’s Blonde opens, quite fittingly, with the flashing of bulbs. In several brief, twinkling moments, we see a rush of images: cameras flashing, spotlights whirring to life, men roaring with excitement (or anger — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), and at the center of it all is her, Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas ), striking her most iconic pose as a gust of wind blows up her white dress. It’s an opening that makes sense for a film about a fictionalized version of Monroe’s life, one that firmly roots the viewer in the world and space of a movie star. But to focus only on de Armas’ Marilyn is to miss the point of Blonde ’s opening moments.

Not your usual biopic

A technical triumph, a great lead performance, less is more.

As the rest of Dominik’s bold, imperfect film proves, Blonde is not just about the recreation of iconic moments, nor is it solely about the making of Monroe’s greatest career highlights. It is, instead, about exposure and, in specific, the act of exposing yourself — for art, for fame, for love — and the ways in which the world often reacts to such raw vulnerability. In the case of Blonde , we’re shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

Blonde does not always succeed at correcting that very sin. There are moments when Dominik, unfortunately, seems to be further playing into the over-sexualization and infantilization of Monroe that has run rampant for decades, and which attempts to render her as nothing more than a naïve sexpot without any agency of her own. But there are also moments in which Blonde feels like it wants nothing more than to honor Monroe not just as a movie star for the ages, but as a brave and capable artist.

Blonde , which is based on Joyce Carol Oates’ divisive 2000 novel of the same name, does not attempt to tell the true story of Marilyn Monroe’s life. Instead, what the film presents is an impressionistic portrait of how Norma Jeane Mortenson, the woman who became the movie star known as Marilyn Monroe, was used and abused by the very people who were supposed to protect and support her. The film’s culprits are many and wide-ranging — covering everyone from Marilyn’s abusive and emotionally unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson) to the retired baseball star who became her second husband (played by Bobby Cannavale) and, eventually, the leader of the free world himself (Caspar Phillipson).

Nearly everyone in the film is based upon people from Monroe’s real life, but its depictions of them are, at times, greatly separate from reality. It’s important to note that up front because, for some viewers, the film’s decision to envision Monroe’s life as being potentially more traumatic than it really was may simply be seen as too big of an ask. For others, like myself, the film’s lies may only help the truths about Monroe’s life and legacy — both the painful and euphoric ones — cut that much deeper. The film, to its credit, doesn’t try to present itself as a grounded biopic, either.

Clocking in at a whopping 166 minutes, Blonde floats through its story, adopting a leisurely pace and editorial style that actively bucks against any kind of traditional narrative structure. Watching it doesn’t feel like you’re being led through a typical three-act story but rather a neverending montage that only occasionally stops along the way to painstakingly recreate iconic images from Monroe’s career. There are certain scenes, in fact, where it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching de Armas’ version of Monroe or stock footage of the real woman, which only further heightens the disorienting effect that Blonde frequently achieves.

Dominik, who has always been prone to visual experimentation, also uses practically every aspect ratio known to man throughout Blonde . The film, therefore, not only repeatedly switches back and forth from pristine black and white photography to technicolor, but it does so while also flipping between vast widescreen 16:9 images and smaller 4:3 compositions. At times, these instances of visual invention feel random, as if they exist solely to further disorient and detach you from reality. In other moments, they feel purposeful and calculated.

Look, for instance, at how the film’s aspect ratio changes on the night Marilyn expects to meet her long-lost father. The film briefly becomes a widescreen picture as Marilyn walks into her hotel room, reflecting the emotional importance she has placed on the moment. Notice then how the aspect ratio begins to shrink, the scope of the scene slowly, visually dwindling, once she realizes it’s not her father waiting for her but Cannavale’s former ballplayer. Notice further how — in a moment of subtle but precise physical acting — Cannavale’s hand slowly surrounds de Armas’ neck as he professes his love for her, his own body unknowingly foreshadowing their relationship’s toxic and abusive future.

Working with cinematographer Chayse Irvin and editor Adam Robinson, Dominik also fills Blonde with some of the most ingeniously constructed dreamlike images you’ll see in a movie this year. One scene, in specific, comes early on in Blonde and finds de Armas’ Norma Jeane gripping the edge of a bed in a moment of sexual ecstasy. As she does, the bedsheets, which spill down the side of the bed, slowly and impossibly transform into Niagara Falls. Dominik then uses this moment to transition from a mid-afternoon tryst to a promotional trailer for the 1953 noir gem, Niagara . Playing over all of these scenes, meanwhile, is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ ethereal, otherworldly score , which not only ranks as one of the year’s best but also lifts Blonde ‘s overwhelming tragic mood to cosmic heights.

At the center of Blonde ’s many surreal images and nightmarish sequences, though, is Ana de Armas, whose performance as Marilyn Monroe feels perfectly calibrated for the film she’s in. The actress looks strikingly similar to Monroe throughout all of Blonde , but much like the film itself, there is an ever-present, often haunting discontent between de Armas and the woman she’s playing.

Part of that has to do with de Armas’ real-life Cuban accent, which never fades even in the moments when the actress herself is leaning all the way into Monroe’s breathy way of speaking. There is also a raw quality to de Armas’ performance, which not only rises to the top of Blonde ’s many emotionally difficult scenes but also imbues the moments when she is recreating Monroe’s work in films like Some Like It Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with added touches of tragedy and rage.

Her performance allows de Armas to predictably outshine nearly everyone else that appears opposite her in Blonde . Adrien Brody does, however, make a heartfelt, quiet mark with his lovestruck performance as Arthur Miller, the celebrated playwright who became Monroe’s third husband. Together, Brody and de Armas create a palpable, romantic warmth that permeates throughout Blonde ’s most emotionally bright, if not entirely happy, section.

As Marilyn, de Armas leaves next to nothing on the table, but the film asks too much of her and frequently fails to rise to her level. That’s evidenced by the fact that there are simply too many scenes in Blonde — especially in its second half — that require de Armas to be either topless or fully naked, a detail that threatens to further endorse the over-sexualization that has long plagued Monroe’s legacy. In order to communicate her inner longing and loneliness, Dominik also has de Armas’ Monroe constantly refer to every man in her life as “daddy,” which is a decision that could have been tolerable had it been used a bit more sparingly.

De Armas’ frequent use of “daddy” is ultimately a symptom of Dominik’s own inability to sense the moments when less would, indeed, be more. The same can be said for the multiple instances where Dominik’s camera goes inside Monroe’s belly to show CGI versions of her unborn children as they speak to her (yes, literally ). The film also features a handful of terribly on-the-nose music cues, including the time when “Bye Bye Baby” begins to play just seconds after de Armas’ Monroe has been coerced into having an abortion that she didn’t want.

These missteps are just a few of the imperfections that prevent Blonde from being as tonally and narratively successful as, say, Dominik’s 2007 directorial effort, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford . However, they’re not egregious enough to render Blonde a wholly unsuccessful endeavor. As a matter of fact, Dominik still tells a moving story of loneliness, regret, and emotional yearning with Blonde , a film that feels less like an outlandish Hollywood dream and more like a nightmarish descent into a dark void.

The film achieves that effect whenever it shifts its focus away from Monroe’s sex symbol status and more toward her merits as a performer and artist. In Blonde , Monroe is both a young woman searching for the father figure she never knew and an intelligent, talented artist who wants nothing more than to be given as much as she gives. It should go without saying which of those aspects of Blonde ’s Marilyn prove to be more compelling, but the film’s occasionally uneven handling of her legacy doesn’t stop its ideas about celebrity — both the costs and requirements of it — from ringing loud and clear.

In the end, it isn’t Blonde ’s various homages to Marilyn Monroe’s real-life career that prove to be its most fruitful moments, either. Instead, it’s the quietest scenes that end up leaving the biggest marks, like one that comes late in the film and follows de Armas as she desperately searches her house for a tip only to find her delivery boy long gone by the time she’s returned to give it to him. Pay attention in this scene to the way that de Armas’ hand lingers in the air, the five dollars still clutched in her palm, even after she realizes that there’s no one on the other side of her gate. It’s a specific kind of heartbreak, realizing only too late that you have yet to find someone willing to put in as much effort for you as you would for them.

Blonde is playing in select theaters now. It premieres Wednesday, September 28 on Netflix.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Rosaline review: Kaitlyn Dever lifts up Hulu’s Romeo and Juliet rom-com riff
• Amsterdam review: An exhausting, overlong conspiracy thriller
• Vesper review: an imaginative sci-fi adventure
• God’s Creatures review: an overly restrained Irish drama
• Meet Cute review: Peacock’s time travel rom-com falls flat

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X, West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl, meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

The Woman King opens purposefully and violently. The film’s first sequence, which brings to life a brutal battle from its sudden beginning all the way to its somber end, is a master class in visual storytelling. Not only does it allow director Gina Prince-Bythewood to, once again, prove her worth as a capable action filmmaker, but it also introduces The Woman King’s central all-female army, sets up the film’s core conflict, and introduces nearly every important character that you’ll need to know for the two hours that follow it. The fact that The Woman King does all of this within the span of a few short minutes just makes its opening sequence all the more impressive.

The level of impressive craftsmanship in The Woman King’s memorably violent prologue is present throughout the entirety of its 135-minute runtime. For that reason, the film often feels like a throwback to an era that seems to reside farther in the past than it actually does, one when it was common for all the major Hollywood studios to regularly put out historical epics that were, if nothing else, reliably well-made and dramatically engaging.

The opening narration of See How They Run, which comes courtesy of Adrien Brody’s ill-fated Leo Köpernick, doesn’t just tell you what kind of movie it is. Brody’s sardonic voice-over also makes it clear that See How They Run knows exactly what kind of a story it’s telling, and so do its characters. As Köpernick is killed by an unknown assailant in See How They Run’s prologue, Brody’s voice even dryly remarks: “I should have seen this coming. It’s always the most unlikable character that gets killed first.”

In a less charming film, See How They Run’s streak of self-aware comedy would wear thin quickly. However, the new film from director Tom George is able to, for the most part, strike the right balance between tongue-in-cheek humor, mystery, and genuine sweetness. The film is a lean, not-particularly-mean whodunit, one that lacks the acidic strain of humor present in some of cinema’s other great murder mysteries, including 2019’s Knives Out, but which still boasts the kind of playful spirit that is at the heart of so many of its notable genre predecessors.

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Blonde’ Review: Andrew Dominik’s Miserable Marilyn Monroe Portrait Only Further Tarnishes the Star

Sophie monks kaufman.

• Share on Facebook
• Share to Flipboard
• Share on LinkedIn
• Show more sharing options
• Submit to Reddit
• Post to Tumblr
• Print This Page
• Share on WhatsApp

Images of Marilyn Monroe are the most replicated of any actress to emerge since the dawn of cinema. Her peroxide curls, cupid’s bow pout, and va-va-voom figure are recognizable to the point that her marketing potential has long since overwhelmed the matter of who she was as a person. To take a swing at saying — or showing —  something resonant about the woman born Norma Jeane Mortenson, a storyteller would have to go to lengths far greater than Andrew Dominik is able to span in his bizarre, miserabilist biopic.

Much like Asaf Kapadia did with his documentary, “Amy,” Dominik critiques the world for reducing his subject down to her topline assets — and then treats her in exactly the same way. His Marilyn is a sexy, breathy blonde with daddy issues. And that’s all, folks.

Well, not quite all, as “Blonde” sets out to show a lifetime of victimization and exploitation. The film is Dominik’s finger pointed at everyone who had a hand traumatizing his leading lady, from her mother trying to drown her in the bath aged 7 to her death from an overdose of barbiturates at 36 after being used and abused by the Hollywood machine.

Drawing from Joyce Carol Oates’ impressionistic “fictionalized” novel of the same name, Dominik brings to life chronological snapshots of the worst moments in Monroe’s life, focusing on the yearning she felt as result of having an absent father and a mentally ill mother, the pregnancies that never led to babies, and the violence and cruelty she suffered at the hands of powerful men. It’s safe to say Dominik will not receive a Christmas card from either the JFK or the Joe DiMaggio estate this year.

Star Ana de Armas ’ uncanny resemblance to Marilyn takes the film a long way. If Dominik had thought as much about actually interpreting his character opposed to resurrecting her physically, “Blonde” could have a tour de force. Famous archive photographs of Marilyn wearing a black turtleneck and cropped trousers, a white dress with a plunging neckline, and even when she cheerfully posed naked are amongst the painstakingly recreated looks given locomotion by De Armas with the help of blue contact lenses and a wig. (Gary Archer is credited for dental prosthetics, suggesting just how far measures were taken to create the eerie doppelgänger, all the way into her mouth.)

The film is obsessed with Monroe’s wide-eyed beauty, and it is apt to capture the quality that enabled Norma to become Marilyn, giving her a passport out of poverty and, on the flip-side, luring in predators of all descriptions. Yet, close-up after close-up after close-up eventually starts to feel less like a knowing nod to her powers, and more like the director trying to have his cake and eat it.

DOP Chayse Irvin does powerful work when the script allows him to capture something other than feminine charms. One early tableau from Norma’s childhood features her mother Gladys (Julianne Nicholson) in the background, framed through a latticed door as she plays the piano while, in the foreground, a faded poster of Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights” flaps on the wall. Shortly afterwards a fire rages throughout the neighborhood. Little Norma and Gladys drive through the flames, while the “HOLLYWOOD” sign sits in the horizon, untouched by the carnage, symbolizing the possibility of something better.

As interpreted through Dominik (who also adapted the screenplay himself), Norma will never reach that something better, not even for a second. He defines her strictly through what she does not have — direction, love, a dad — resulting in a gaping lack to De Armas’ earnestly committed performance; she is playing a character with no autonomy. Her task — which she carries off beautifully, tearfully, and often toplessly — is to show the wounds inflicted on her, like sentient memory foam.

“Like watching a mental patient. Not acting. Not technique,” comments one member of the production after the then-unknown Marilyn’s emotional audition for “Don’t Bother To Knock” (1952). Dominik never presents an alternate account for his leading lady’s acting prowess, nor salutes her own role in her image creation. Her time as a diligent student with Lee Strasberg is reduced down to an oft-flashed back to black-and-white sequence of Marilyn and other students repeating a line about “carrying a circle of light.” He presents her as someone for whom acting was an innate untutored gift, rather than as a student intent on mastering her craft. She is a savant, a babe in the woods, a Balthazar the donkey with ass to spare.

A motif running through “Blonde” is the distinction between Norma, who is real, and Marilyn, who is not. Norma is clear that she is not Marilyn and craves male companions who see beyond the sex symbol alter-ego that she slips on and off. As her career is taking off, she falls into a menage a trois with rakish dissolutes, Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) for what will prove the high watermark of her relationships with men.

All three are beautiful people who share a pervasive sadness as a result of being abandoned. Per EGR, “We’re the juniors of men who never wanted us.” All do their utmost to sublimate sorrow through the pleasures of the flesh. One fabulous transition involves an orgasming Norma, head thrown back, clasping at a bed that becomes waterfalls overlaid by the title cards for “Niagara.” The phrase, “A RAGING TORRENT OF EMOTION,” fills the cinema screen as Norma watches nervously in the audience.

Dominik’s visual flourishes are not always as successful. There has been early hype about the “womb camera” as we see the world from the POV of an unborn baby. This, at least, has the merit of being camp. More tedious is the over-reliance on slow-motion shots of Marilyn overwhelmed by crowds of snarling paparazzi to the sound of camera bulbs flashing. Dominik really wants to put across that she was oppressed through both force and neglect, and over-uses flashbacks to both a sexual assault and a photograph of the man her mum presented as her dad. A relentless sound design by the usually exquisite Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is misjudged, steamrolling through a film that already lacks nuance.

As Norma becomes increasingly troubled and fearful of ending up like her mother, hope is kept alive by letters that sporadically arrive from a man who signs off as her “tearful daddy.” He dangles the possibility of their meeting without ever committing to a date. These letters move her more than her marriage to either an abusive Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) or a gentile Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), much older men whom she addresses as “Daddy” in an act of Technicolor displacement. The Miller marriage is the only other reprieve presented in her sprint towards the grave, and Brody delivers a gentle intellectualism that feels like a port in a storm.

It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim. To watch any of her movies is to feast on a luminous performer whose intelligence is sublimated beneath a knowingly hypnotic physical affect. Her legacy is still best preserved through her talents, rather than through a film that might as well be another face printed by Andy Warhol’s factory — an X-rayed version, so that instead of bright pop art colors, the stencil is simply of a skull.

“Blonde” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Netflix will release the film in select theaters on Friday, September 16 and on its streaming platform on  Wednesday, September 28.

Most Popular

You may also like.

Review: 'Blonde' is hard to watch, but impossible to forget

Marilyn Monroe's life was no joke.

To judge from the haunting and haunted "Blonde," in theaters on its way to Netflix on Sept. 28, Marilyn Monroe's life was no joke. She was too stressed maintaining the blonde bombshell image the Hollywood patriarchy had used to commodify, abuse and imprison her.

Based on the 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, the film also reshapes the facts of Monroe's life to get closer to her bruised psyche. Written and directed by Andrew Dominik ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") with a poet's eye and a forensic attention to punishing detail, "Blonde" is glamour cloaked in misery.

It's also a nearly three-hour endurance test that only fitfully gets at something primal and true. But when it hits you'll be knocked for a loop. Monroe died in 1962 of barbiturate poisoning, a probable suicide, at 36. "Blonde" means to shake you with its challenges. And does it ever.

All praise to the raw and riveting Ana de Armas, the Cuban star of "Knives Out" and "No Time to Die" Bond girl who through the tools of makeup, hair and wardrobe -- coupled with acting sorcery -- delivers a performance that verges on reincarnation. She recreates Monroe's breathy whisper of sexual compliance with a subtext of the nervous tension roiling underneath.

What a coincidence that the two leading cultural and sexual icons of the 20th-century, Monroe and Elvis Presley, have both been mythologized in movies this year. Though Elvis died at 42, a broken and bloated shadow of his former self, he had it easy compared to Monroe.

In and out of orphanages and foster homes while her mother, ferociously played by "Mare of Easttown" Emmy winner Julianne Nicholson, struggled with health issues, young Monroe -- then Norma Jeane -- held tight to her mother's claims that her unnamed, unseen father would one day rescue her.

MORE: Review: 'Anatomy of a Scandal' features exhilrating performances

That day never comes, though Monroe purrs "Daddy" to her father-figure husbands, baseball great Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) and playwright genius Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody). One abuses her physically while the other exploits her tragedy in his plays and movies.

De Armas gives us a Monroe who's had to roll with the punches since childhood. A young Norma Jeane, played by radiant 8-year-old Lily Fisher, must endure her mother's attempts to drown her in a bathtub and also drive them both into a raging Los Angeles wildfire.

Talk about trauma. And yet Monroe believes her "Daddy" will save her. In one interlude, she embarks on a simultaneous sexual adventure with two men, Charles Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Garret Dillahunt),with famous daddies who neglected them.

Too much? You bet. As are the scenes in which Monroe has conversations with the fetuses she has aborted due to studio insistence -- or out of her own fear that her mother's mental health issues will be passed on to the children she says she wants so much.

Dominik takes great pains to show the intelligence that Monroe hid under her salable disguise as the ultimate dumb blonde. We watch her shrewdly negotiate a contract that will make her a financial equal with Jane Russell, her costar in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes."

Later on the set of 1959's "Some Like It Hot," we watch Monroe rage at director Billy Wilder for demeaning her by having costar Jack Lemmon ogle her wiggle and lewdly joke that she "looks like Jell-o on springs." What would cancel culture make of that sexist comment today?

Monroe never felt the support of #MeToo. Her insecurities had men define her as a difficult diva. On screen, at least, Monroe always had the last laugh, ready to tease her image before anyone else could do it. Which is why her best performances still feel fresh and spontaneous.

MORE: Review: 'Hustle' radiates love for the game in every frame

What "Blonde" shows us is a sex symbol uninterested in sex. "We're soulmates," she confides to two Secret Service agents delivering her to a secret hotel assignation with President John Kennedy. But as Dominik films that scene, JFK callously treats her like a piece of meat.

De Armas makes us feel every slight, every humiliation, like a series of cuts that register like PTSD before that term was coined.

Does Dominik exploit Monroe by reducing her life to a series of assaults administered by men he films like lustful gargoyles? Sometimes. But the film is far from "The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by the Coward Andrew Dominik."

In the final analysis, Dominik cares too much. As Monroe's leg dangles from her deathbed in the final scene, Dominik grants the tormented Norman Jeane a peaceful stillness she and Marilyn never found in life. "Blonde" is hard to watch, but impossible to forget.

Popular Reads

Shooting suspect's father charged with murder

• Sep 5, 11:26 PM

You might not want to rush to get new COVID shot

• Aug 26, 11:25 AM

15-year-old fatally shot in high school bathroom

• Sep 6, 4:56 PM

ABC News releases Trump-Harris debate rules

• Sep 4, 6:33 PM

4 dead in shooting at Georgia high school

• Sep 4, 10:47 PM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

Review: ‘Blonde’ isn’t really about Marilyn Monroe. It’s about making her suffer

• Copy Link URL Copied!

There’s at least one moment in “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s dazzling, depressing and fatally incurious movie about Marilyn Monroe, when you might not be sure if you’re watching Ana de Armas or the genuine article. Watching this lustrous black-and-white sequence, set during the production of “Some Like It Hot” (1959), I was briefly certain that was the real Monroe boop-boop-be-dooping her way through “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” so evocatively does De Armas narrow her gaze (her eyes are the big giveaway) and drink in the milky adoration of the spotlight. Only the absence of that teasing shadow on her dress, the one that mimics a rising and falling neckline, gives the game away.

Even in these times of Oscar-grubbing biopic overload, a moment like that has to count as some kind of achievement. It takes more than crimson lips, swiveling hips and a platinum dye job to incarnate this most enduring of 20th century movie stars, even if Monroe was reduced to her physical attributes for too much of her short life and extraordinary career. People insisted she couldn’t act; studios typecast her as a dumb blond, a setback she partly overcame through sly wit and brilliant comic timing. In time, she became an icon, but even that overused word, “icon,” can feel diminishing after a while. It relegates Monroe’s greatness to the level of surfaces and publicity and indiscriminate goddess worship, as if her beauty could be somehow disentangled from her singular greatness — her genius — as an actor.

For your safety

The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

De Armas doesn’t get nearly enough opportunities to tap into that greatness. Radiantly sympathetic in scene after scene, she delivers a strong, intensely felt performance in a movie that doesn’t begin to earn it, that insists on squeezing her sometimes eerie channeling of Monroe’s image into the puniest possible dramatic mold. Dominik seems to have directed De Armas to lead with her tremulous vulnerability, to drift through the movie in blurred states of fragility, anxiety and panic. She steps into pitch-perfect re-creations of vintage Monroe photographs, sometimes fixing us with a half-pleading, half-conspiratorial smile. She does a sustained approximation of Monroe’s breathily seductive voice, sometimes with unmistakable traces of her own Cuban-Spanish accent — a flaw that’s earned some criticism but, if anything, strengthens the movie’s notion of Monroe as a construct, a gorgeous mask that keeps slipping. The superficial imperfections of De Armas’ performance aren’t the problem with “Blonde.” It needs every ounce of her, and her humanity, that it can muster.

Even the levitational pleasure of that “Some Like It Hot” scene can’t last. Before long, this Marilyn isn’t singing; she’s screaming and flailing and bringing the production to a halt. Dominik doesn’t do much by halves, diva crackups included, and it’s dispiriting to realize that this is why he bothered with this particular Hollywood re-creation. Monroe, then just four years away from her death of a barbiturate overdose at age 36, was already deep in the throes of addiction; stories of her difficulty remembering her lines (and her less-than-collegial treatment by Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder) are legion. It couldn’t matter less to Dominik that she wound up giving one of her greatest, funniest performances anyway. What matters is the chance to unleash Monroe’s many demons — a miserable childhood, a rapacious industry, a cavalcade of bad, brutalizing men — and bring them rushing to the surface, not for the first or final time.

In “Blonde,” Monroe’s pain is never final. The insults, the abandonments, the beatings, the rapes, the addictions, the losses of consciousness and selfhood — these aren’t just cruel twists or setbacks; they’re the movie’s organizing principles. With a meticulous command of craft and the kind of high seriousness that only a nearly three-hour running time can signify, Dominik sets out to chronicle the many degradations that were inflicted on Monroe’s body and spirit, plus a few that probably weren’t. (His blueprint is Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel of the same title.) Like his great 2007 western, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” “Blonde” has been conceived as a slow-motion death march: “The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Basically Everyone She Ever Met.” And in every aesthetic detail, from the brooding undertow of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score to the artfully arbitrary mix of color and black-and-white in Chayse Irvin’s boxily framed images, “Blonde” styles itself as a work of rare, unflinching honesty — a nightmarish plunge into the Hollywood abattoir that ground up and finally devoured its most sublime creation.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But “Blonde” is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative. That’s not something I would say about Oates’ novel, a sprawling demolition of the Monroe mythos that, by freely revising and departing from the biographical record, arrives at its own tough truths about its subject. Framed as a sordid 20th century fairy tale, it achieves a far richer, more expansive kind of portraiture than this blunt instrument of a movie ultimately manages.

Something seems off from the hasty opening scenes of Norma Jeane (an affecting Lily Fisher) growing up in early 1930s Los Angeles with her volatile mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson, fierce), who’s soon diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized. Developments that consumed chapters of the book — Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage and foster care, her short-lived first marriage at age 16 — are omitted entirely, which isn’t a deal breaker; even at two hours and 45 minutes, “Blonde” can’t be expected to accommodate the density of a 700-plus-page narrative. But it’s what Dominik chooses to do — and not do — with those two hours and 45 minutes that suggests a bigger problem than basic compression issues.

The movie skips ahead to Norma Jeane’s early modeling days (enter De Armas in a breezy pinup montage), which in turn open the door to an acting career. Unfortunately, that door leads into the office of a studio mogul who lifts her skirt, sexually assaults her and then sends her briskly on her way — a scene that’s set, with startlingly jejune crudeness, to “Ev’ry Baby Needs a Da-Da-Daddy.” That song choice is one of many numbing references to the gaping father wound she’s borne since childhood, ever since her mother implied that Norma Jeane’s never-seen father was himself a famous Hollywood actor. Even as she rises to new heights of fame if not necessarily fortune (like a lot of studio contract players, Monroe was grossly underpaid), she keeps scanning the crowds for the man she believes has been watching and protecting her from afar.

This lays the emotional groundwork for just about every bad romance that lies ahead. She falls into a tabloid-titillating threesome with two hunky Hollywood scions, Charlie “Cass” Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward “Eddy” G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), both nursing daddy issues of a different kind. This subplot, one of the novel’s weirder fabrications, coincides with Norma Jeane’s full public emergence as Marilyn, which soon draws her toward older, higher-profile suitors. “Daddy” turns out to be Norma Jeane’s preferred term of endearment for husbands Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), who smacks her around and resents her fame, and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who treats her with more tenderness, if also the same lofty condescension she gets from everyone else.

Norma Jeane’s mommy issues are an equivalent source of torment; she’s desperate to have a child and become the kind of stable, supportive mother she herself never had. To that end, I guess, Dominik visualizes her failed pregnancies — one ends in an abortion, another in a miscarriage — as tragedies of a cosmic order. In goes the surreally invasive utero-cam; out come the kitschy images of a fetus glowing inside Norma Jeane’s womb. (The Star Child in “2001” didn’t exude this much celestial wonderment.) But if “Blonde” boasts some of the most gynecological mise-en-scène this side of Gaspar Noé’s “Enter the Void,” that’s nothing compared with the nadir of a scene in which an older, wearier Norma Jeane is dumped like a sack of meat in President Kennedy’s hotel suite. The violation that follows, which likely accounts for the movie’s NC-17 rating, has an in-your-face ugliness that wants to be seen as courageously unadorned, but all the scene really does is wallow, to no moral or intelligent purpose, in the spectacle of Monroe’s debasement.

Salacious rumors have been swirling around “Blonde” since well before its recent Venice International Film Festival premiere, but pre-release controversy was always to be expected of a movie about a Hollywood star who’s lost none of her tragic mystique 60 years after her death. The outrage that greeted Kim Kardashian when she wore Monroe’s historic “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” gown to this year’s Met Gala was a reminder of the feverish protectiveness the actor can still inspire. It was also a reminder of how often that protectiveness expresses itself through the trappings and accouterments of an endlessly reproducible image — an image that, according to “Blonde,” so consumed and obscured the real Norma Jeane that it ultimately obliterated her.

“That thing up on the screen, it isn’t me,” she murmurs when she sees herself perform “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and you understand her alienation from the defining 20th century sex symbol she’s fast becoming. But in “Blonde’s” clumsy hands, even that legitimate insight feels too easy. Her star persona may have been a glittering Hollywood construct, but to suggest that Marilyn Monroe had no hand in the creation of Marilyn Monroe is to deny her a very specific form of agency, and I don’t mean William Morris. Because Dominik can’t conceive of Monroe as anything but a victim, he can’t even grant her the respect of seeing her as, at the very least, a participant in her success and her undoing. A smarter, tougher movie would have explored that participation and recognized it as its own kind of power — a power as undeniable as the allure of the movies themselves.

“Blonde” seems blind to that allure, even scornful of it. There’s no sense of Monroe the brilliant screen comedian, the joyous cinematic life force. Instead, Dominik operates by a simplistic dramatic equation that ties her greatest professional highs to her worst personal lows: How could Marilyn — or anyone, really — take any joy in the applause for “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” when all she can think about is her guilt over her studio-ordered abortion? Why should her famous interaction with a subway grate in “The Seven Year Itch” be anything but a windy metaphor for all the lecherous hounds of Hollywood, driven home — in case we missed the point — by all those men leering at her from the crowd, flashbulbs popping like gunfire?

“In the movies, they chop you all to bits: cut, cut, cut,” Norma Jeane says. She’s contrasting film acting, where performances are often pieced together in the editing room, with the stage acting that she aspires to do; she’s also expressing a level of aesthetic and intellectual curiosity that earns her the usual sneering dismissals. But “Blonde” subjects Monroe to its own grisly vivisection. It lays the most betrayed, abused and vulnerable parts of her out across the screen and chucks the rest away: her talent, her magnetism, her smarts, her guts. “Blonde” can be remarkably cruel, but really, it’s not all that remarkable. It won’t be the first movie, or the last, that Marilyn Monroe outlives.

Rating: NC-17, for some sexual content Running time: 2 hours, 46 minutes Playing: In limited release; starts streaming Sept. 28 on Netflix

More to Read

A look into the decade that defined Brian De Palma could use more critical consideration

Sept. 3, 2024

Review: A killer Mia Goth returns in ‘MaXXXine,’ a flimsy thriller that doesn’t deserve her

July 4, 2024

‘MaXXXine’ is Ti West’s Hollywood horror story. The real-life locations are even scarier

July 2, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: A nightmarishly good character actor obscures everything else about ‘The Front Room’

Sept. 6, 2024

Review: Anticipating loss, sisters rub against old frictions in superb ‘His Three Daughters’

Review: ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’ tracks down a cyberghost who taught a generation how to type

Pamela Anderson, Ben Stiller, Jamie Lee Curtis and more visit L.A. Times Studio at TIFF

Find anything you save across the site in your account

“Blonde” Is “The Passion of the Christ” for Marilyn Monroe

Even if “Blonde,” written and directed by Andrew Dominik, had offered a sympathetic and discerning view of the private life of Marilyn Monroe, it would have been a cinematic disaster. The movie is ridiculously vulgar—the story of Monroe as if it were channelled through Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” The character endures an overwhelming series of relentless torments that, far from arousing fear and pity, reflect a special kind of directorial sadism. In an effort to decry the protagonist’s sufferings, “Blonde” wallows in them. It depicts Monroe as the plaything of her times, her milieu, and her fate, by way of turning her into the filmmaker’s own plaything. The very subject of the film is the deformation of Monroe’s personality and artistry by Hollywood studio executives and artists; in order to tell that story, Dominik replicates it in practice.

“ Blonde ,” adapted from the eponymous novel by Joyce Carol Oates , has a single idea: that, throughout her life, Monroe was victimized. The child Norma Jeane Mortenson (played by Lily Fisher) is the victim of her father, who never wanted her; of her mother (Julianne Nicholson), who is mentally ill; of neighbors who deliver her to an orphanage. As a young woman, she’s the victim of photographers who take pictures of her in the nude. As Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas), she is the victim of a studio boss, Mr. Z (David Warshofsky), who rapes her and then rewards her with roles; of an agent who crafts her persona and forces her to conform to it; of producers and directors who underpay her and stereotype her as sexy and dumb; of her two lovers in a threesome, who use and abuse her confidences. She is the victim of her two husbands during her years of fame: Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), who wants her not to work, is fiercely jealous, and is physically abusive; and Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), who vampirizes her for his work. She is sexually assaulted by President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson); she is abused by the Secret Service on his behalf. (The movie doesn’t name DiMaggio or Kennedy but identifies them unambiguously by their traits and their roles in Monroe’s life.)

Paparazzi and the press intrude on her private life. Her adoring fans are slobbering perverts who demand her sexiness onscreen and her grateful adoration in public appearances. They mistake her Marilyn Monroe persona for her real self, even though she considers it a pure product for public consumption, having little to do with her real personality. The movie’s emblematic moment shows her looking at a photo of herself—of Marilyn Monroe—in a magazine and saying, “She is pretty, but she isn’t me.” Yet the film never gets close to suggesting who, indeed, the real person is.

The movie presents Marilyn as a thrillingly talented actor who, long before her experience with the Actors Studio , delves deep into personal experience and emotional memory to deliver performances of a shocking intensity. It also indicates that Hollywood offers little outlet for that artistry, and, instead, corners her into roles centered on her sexual allure. It presents her as a well-read, thoughtful, and insightful actor whose artistic ideal and dream remain the theatre, and—in the movie’s best scene—she explains why. During her first date with DiMaggio, she tells him that she wants to leave Hollywood for New York, to study acting, to learn to be a great actress, and to do theatre (above all, Chekhov), because acting in the movies is “cut cut cut.” She adds, “It’s a jigsaw puzzle, but you’re not the one to put the pieces together.” It’s true that acting in movies and onstage are entirely different, and those who are good at one aren’t necessarily well suited to the other. “Blonde” doesn’t display the difference but merely asserts it; the film only winks and nods in the general direction of what Marilyn might have achieved onstage.

Movies may well be “cut cut cut,” and Dominik inflicts some uniquely unkind ones on the character of Marilyn. He omits what ought to have been a prime moment of theatrical bravura, at Marilyn’s first class at the Actors Studio, where she’s put onstage to read the lead role in a play by Miller, who’s there watching skeptically, dubious of the Hollywood diva’s ability to perform the complex role to his satisfaction. Instead, she elicits her classmates’ wild applause and Miller’s stunned admiration and tears of emotion. But that performance itself? Not a second of it is shown.

There isn’t anything about the real-life Monroe’s politics, including her defiance of the press and the studio to marry Miller (who was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his former links to the Communist Party), her conversion to Judaism, and her own activism (including against nuclear weapons). There isn’t anything about the control that Monroe took over her own career by forming a production company in order to choose and develop her own projects; there isn’t anything about her early enthusiasm for movies or her discovery of modelling. (The movie skips from the child Norma Jeane’s arrival at an orphanage to a rapid montage of the teen-ager’s photos in magazines.) There’s nothing of her effort to escape from poverty and drudgery, her serious and thoughtful efforts to develop her career; not a word about Monroe’s extremely hard work as an actress, or her obsessive dependence, for seven or eight years, on her acting coach Natasha Lytess. In short, whatever has to do with Monroe’s devotion to her art and her attention to her business is relegated to the thinnest of margins.

The movie does insist, by way of a handful of scenes, that the character of Marilyn is an intelligent and insightful actor, yet “Blonde” reduces to an indicative, forensic minimum the scenes in which she expresses sharp ideas and discerning thoughts. For instance, Marilyn says, en route to her catastrophic visit to J.F.K. in a hotel room, that there’s nothing sexual about their relationship. But what went on between them in the encounters before the one in which he attacks her is completely absent. If she had a social life apart from her relationships with men, whether Kennedy, DiMaggio, Miller, or a pair of lovers—Charlie Chaplin, Jr. (Xavier Samuel), and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. (Evan Williams), with whom she’s shown in a threesome—Dominik is uninterested in it.

The problem isn’t just what Dominik doesn’t imagine but what he does. He directs as if he defines poetry as using ten vague words where three clear ones would suffice, and then transfers that misconception to images. In order to approximate a sense of subjectivity, of Marilyn’s states of mind, he relies on images that are out of focus (but not so much that they’re truly obscure), a soundtrack that submerges voices in aquatic murk (but not completely), slow-motion scenes to underline feelings without developing them, a palette that flips back and forth between color and black-and-white (her life sometimes seems to her like a movie—get it?).

But such floppy approximations are trivial alongside Dominik’s more garish and demonstrative tricks. When Marilyn becomes pregnant, it’s through one of the most sophomoric effects I’ve ever seen. She spends an evening outdoors with the two Juniors, talking astrology while looking up at a sky full of stars that begin to move and then morph into squiggling sperm. Her fetus is then shown in the womb, and that fetus returns to the movie repeatedly, in C.G.I. fetus follies that ultimately involve it speaking to her. Marilyn gets an abortion, in order to act in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”; this is traumatic, as is a later miscarriage and another, vaguely suggested subsequent abortion. Through all of these episodes, the straining for poignancy and subjectivity is done crudely and callously. A view upward and out, from the point of view of Marilyn’s vagina toward the abortionist, evokes Dominik’s own violation and misuse of the character’s body. Amid such grotesquerie and such vulgarity, de Armas’s performance alone, energetic and nuanced, lends the film a modicum of dignity.

Other such effects and gimmicks throughout the film trivialize its ostensible import and render its grim torment ridiculous. For instance, when Kennedy comes in Marilyn’s mouth, the TV in his room shows a clip of a rocket blasting off and shots (seemingly taken from “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”) in which alien spacecraft explode against the Washington Monument and the Capitol. Marilyn’s lifelong quest for her father culminates in his face—the face of the man whom her mother called her father—being projected into the sky at the moment of her death. When Marilyn’s songs from her movies are clipped onto the soundtrack, they’re ones that feature the word “daddy,” as from “Ladies of the Chorus,” and “baby,” from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” You’ve got to hand it to Dominik: he doesn’t only outdo the ostensibly crass showmen of classic Hollywood in overt artistic ambition but also in cheap sentiment, brazen tastelessness, and sexual exploitation. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

They thought that they’d found the perfect apartment. They weren’t alone .

The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization .

What happened to the whale from “Free Willy.”

It was one of the oldest buildings left downtown. Why not try to save it ?

The religious right’s leading ghostwriter .

After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served .

A comic strip by Alison Bechdel: the seven-minute semi-sadistic workout .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes
• Movie Reviews

Blonde review: A bleakly arty biopic misses the mark — and the spark

Ana de Armas does her best Norma Jeane in a jumbled, misogynistic melodrama that fails to meet her halfway.

In the business of biopics, what becomes a legend most? Earlier this year, Baz Luhrman's Elvis offered a portrait of the artist as a fever-dream highlight reel, all Technicolor dazzle and lascivious crotch zooms. Several months later, writer-director Andrew Dominik ( The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ) arrives with his own auteur vision of Marilyn Monroe: an airless, disjointed, occasionally gorgeous arthouse collage that somehow manages to spend nearly three hours reducing a cultural icon to less than the sum of her parts.

Which is not to say that all parts of star Ana de Armas aren't put on display, relentlessly; she spends long stretches of the movie nude, and several scenes go where only OB-GYNs have gone before. The already-notorious NC-17 rating that precedes the film (in theaters now and on Netflix Sept. 28) actually turns out to be a strange misdirection: As pornography, Blonde is tame, even boring. As exploitation it's far more explicit, portraying the actress as a disturbed woman-child with no agency, no joy, and no real allies in the world, a doomed butterfly bent again and again on the wheel of fame and our own insatiable voyeurism.

Not, in Dominik's telling, that she ever stood a chance. Her mother ( Mare of Easttown 's Julianne Nicholson ) is a character straight out of Tennessee Williams, a raging mentally-ill alcoholic with delusions of grandeur, screaming abuse at the daughter she never asked for and occasionally attempting to drown her in the bathtub. What she leaves little Norma Jeane with by the time she's carted away is primarily PTSD, and an enduring obsession with the elusive father she never met. (He's someone very important in show business is all she knows, or at least has repeatedly been told.) Norma Jeane's subsequent time in orphanages and foster care is mostly implied, glossed over in favor of smash-cutting straight to Marilyn the starlet: dimpled, gleaming, platinum to the root.

To be fair, the film's structure is the work of Joyce Carol Oates, whose impressionistic 2000 novel Dominik pulls his source material from. Her version clocked in at nearly 750 pages; his, heroically, moves through the entirety of Monroe's life in just under 170 minutes. Many of the iconic screen moments and love interests are here, faithfully replicated in some form: the brief, contentious marriage to Joe DiMaggio ( Bobby Cannavale ) and longer but no less ill-fated pivot to Arthur Miller ( Adrien Brody ); epochal re-creations from The Seven Year Itch , Some Like It Hot , and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . John F. Kennedy, represented here as a casually cruel bully who handles her like cargo, duly makes an appearance — in a single scene just long enough for Marilyn to give him a coerced blow job in extreme closeup, while her eyes fill with tears and she castigates herself in an inner monologue not to choke or throw up on the Presidential baton.

That's the stuff Blonde is pretty much made of: small, faraway glimpses of glamour and glory, subsumed by misery. Monroe speaks earnestly of hopes and dreams, just a girl who wants to better herself through Chekhov and make beautiful babies. But mostly she staggers around calling men who aren't her daddy "Daddy" and staining movie sets and red-carpet premieres with her tears. There's no role she actually wants to play once she lands it, and no aspect of being a star that she enjoys; from the very beginning it's less a career than a cross to bear. More ad-hoc tragedies are piled on by the script when true history does not suffice, or whenever she dares to veer too close to happiness.

What the story lacks in personal fulfillment, Dominik colors in with own cinematic imagination, turning an orgasm into a waterfall that becomes the 1953 noir Niagara and conjuring a glowing in-utero fetus straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey . The film stock toggles between creamy, high-contrast black and white and saturated color; frames shimmer and melt like psychedelic taffy. As busy as it is with the outlines of biography, though, the screenplay rarely bothers with cohesion or momentum. It's just a series of evocative, increasingly distressing set pieces, a slow-motion car wreck wending toward its inevitable end.

De Armas, breathy and luminous, gamely submits to it all, and the resemblance once she's bewigged and be-moled is startling, particularly when Dominik replicates certain films and photo shoots exactly. (Her native Cuban accent, painstakingly minimized, hardly disrupts the level of non-reality already happening on screen, but it is distracting.) The main thing the movie misses in portraying Marilyn solely as a tragic sex bomb isn't just the pleasure that Monroe herself brought to millions, but de Armas's inner light too. The spark and vitality so evident in previous projects like Knives Out and No Time to Die has been smothered down to one note: walking wound. What's left is mostly empty iconography and a few indelible images, a bombastic curiosity wrapped in the guise of high art. Some like it cold. Grade: D+

Related content:

• Ana de Armas questions Blonde NC-17 rating: 'I didn't understand why that happened'
• Marilyn Monroe's estate defends casting of Ana de Armas in Blonde amid accent criticism
• Ana de Armas says her job 'wasn't to imitate' Marilyn Monroe while making Blonde

Related Articles

Blonde (United States, 2022)

60 years after her untimely death, Marilyn Monroe retains her mystique and mystery. Arguably the movie industry’s biggest female star and the progenitor of the modern sex symbol, the “real” Marilyn (born Norma Jean Mortenson then baptized Norma Jean Baker) has remained somewhat elusive, hidden behind the mythology that has developed in the six decades since Marilyn swallowed too many sleeping pills. The latest filmmaker to attempt to probe into Marilyn’s reality is Andrew Dominik ( Killing Them Softly ), who sees the actress as a role played by Norma Jean. He also seems more interested in the allegorical aspects of Marilyn’s life, offering a cautionary tale about the ugly side of stardom and a vicious takedown of the pre-#metoo misogynistic Hollywood system. The end result is an overlong journey into misery that loses sight of the light as it delves ever deeper into the darkness.

The Marilyn of this movie is a victim and Blonde is a chronicle of her victimization – not so much a story as a tedious collage of loosely-interrelated incidents. By focusing primarily on how Marilyn was exploited by nearly everyone in her life, the movie loses all the things that made her into an icon. There’s no joy to be found here, just unrelieved misery. Blonde is acknowledged to be a “fictionalized biography” that uses established facts as the skeleton of a narrative that’s as much made-up as it is real. Based on what has made it to the screen, it’s hard to understand why Marilyn was famous at all.

The movie begins during Norma Jean’s childhood (she’s played as a young girl by Lily Fisher), showing the emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by her mentally unstable mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Throughout its running length, Blonde emphasizes the importance of her parents to Norma Jean and how their absence contributes to an ongoing sense of abandonment and inadequacy. Gladys ends up in a mental asylum; Norma Jean visits her several times seeking approval only to be ignored or dismissed. Her absentee father contacts her via apologetic letters but refuses a face-to-face meeting. Meanwhile, her ambiguity about her mother’s inadequacies influences a decision to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.

To emphasize the “artistic” nature of his film, Dominik feels compelled to play with film techniques. The movie often changes aspect ratios; although the majority of the scenes are presented in 1.33:1, there are times when a more cinematic option is used. The director freely and haphazardly switches between black & white and color. For a while, I tried to figure out a reason for the changes but every time I considered a possibility, it was quickly invalidated. Whatever the rationale, I wasn’t able to decode it. The director’s voyeuristic instincts also lead to innovations like the “fetus-cam” that we might be better without.

The MPAA has seen fit to brand Blonde with the scarlet NC-17. The reasons for this say more about the men and woman comprising the ratings committee than it does about the film. The amount of nudity in Blonde is significant but not excessive. Off the top of my head, I can name a half-dozen R-rated films that were more extreme. The likely reason for the classification is the scene in which Marilyn performs oral sex on JFK. However, although there’s no doubt about what’s happening, it’s not explicit. The President’s member is kept off-screen. Overall, I’d argue that if Basic Instinct deserves an R then it’s difficult at best to make the case that Blonde should be given an NC-17.

Comments Add Comment

• Cider House Rules, The (1999)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• War Zone, The (1999)
• Hole in My Heart, A (2005)
• Neon Demon, The (2016)
• Showgirls (1995)
• Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
• Knives Out (2019)
• No Time to Die (2021)
• Hands of Stone (2016)
• War Dogs (2016)
• Gray Man, The (2022)
• King Kong (2005)
• King of the Hill (1993)
• Pianist, The (2002)
• Darjeeling Limited, The (2007)
• Cadillac Records (2008)
• Splice (2010)
• Irishman, The (2019)
• Romance and Cigarettes (2007)
• Night Listener, The (2006)
• Thunder Force (2021)
• Annie (2014)
• Fast Food Nation (2006)

‘Blonde’ Tells a Story of Marilyn Monroe That’s All Pain, No Pleasure

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

Britney spears biopic, based on her memoir, in the works, ‘back to black’: amy winehouse’s biopic is seriously out of tune, ana de armas fans settle false advertising lawsuit over 'yesterday' trailer, editor’s picks, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, 25 most influential creators of 2024, cedric bixler-zavala slams linkin park's emily armstrong over alleged danny masterson support, dr disrespect knowingly sent explicit messages to a minor, former twitch employee says, spotify wins copyright infringement lawsuit over eminem royalties due to legal loophole, trump bashes his lawyers during wild e. jean carroll rant.

Blonde is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ epic novel of the same name , published in 2000. It isn’t the first. Joyce Chopra, director of the seminal Laura Dern movie Smooth Talk, which was also based on Oates’ writing, took a crack at adapting Blonde back in 2001, in a made-for-TV movie that starred Poppy Montgomery as Marilyn, and beside her, a cast ranging from Griffin Dunne, Eric Bogosian, and Wallace Shawn to Patrick Dempsey and Kirstie Alley. This version whittles Oates’ frightfully earnest novel down into a story of much plainer style than what Dominik is attempting in his new version. Eerily, both movies — one reconfiguring the novel into an old-fashioned soap opera (not a pejorative), the other grasping for the avant garde — have alighted on many of the same, sensationalistic beats from Oates’ novel, down to even some of the same, memorable lines, as when Marilyn, smitten with Arthur Miller, says that he needn’t call her Marilyn, or even Norma — he doesn’t even need to call her by name: “You can call me ‘Hey you!’” These movies don’t look or feel the same; one takes its melodrama for granted, and the other strains to push its melodramatic hysteria to more intellectual heights. It’s strange that they should both barrel toward the same foregone conclusions, but not unexpected. We cannot help but tell the same stories about Marilyn Monroe. Admittedly, a filmmaker looking to break free of that cycle would probably find it wise to avoid Oates’ novel altogether, not because the novel itself is so purely reductive (though the minority opinion, upon its release, did take it to task for its masochistic, near-pornographic emotional hysteria), but because Oates’ rendition is practically booby trapped, prone to being misused in precisely this manner. This is a novelist who’s written first-person fictionalizations of Chappaquiddick, the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, and Jeffrey Dahmer; fear of sensationalism is not exactly her affliction. She largely gets away with it, however, because her domain is the old-fashioned gothic. The scandalous, the sensational, are her tools — useful ones at that, because they are inherently double-edged. Oates can use our helpless fascination with dead spectacles against us, inspiring true repulsion, much like a trickster genie who’d warned us to be careful what we wish for. Her novels are often in danger of spinning from their axes for exactly this reason — the emotions she labors to narrate, in her jittery, observant prose, are reckless. 

Jimi Hendrix Documentary Film Coming From 'Greatest Night in Pop' Director

• Life on Screen
• By Tomás Mier

‘His Three Daughters’ Turns a Familiar Family Drama Into the Best Movie of the Year

• MOVIE REVIEW
• By David Fear

'Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos' Looks Back at the Iconic Mob Series — and the Man Who Made It

• don't stop believin'
• By Alan Sepinwall

Doug Emhoff Addresses Donald Trump's Attacks on Kamala Harris: 'It’s a Distraction'

• Late-Night TV
• By Emily Zemler

SAG-AFTRA Reaches Interim Agreement on AI Protections With 80 Video Games

• Press Start

Most Popular

Brad pitt and george clooney dance to 4-minute standing ovation for ‘wolfs’ during chaotic venice premiere, richard gere jokes he had "no chemistry" with julia roberts in 'pretty woman', demi moore fuels speculation that she doesn't approve of channing tatum's plans to remake ghost, navarro, pegula highlight billionaire parents at u.s. open, you might also like, toronto looks to international for growth, rihanna’s on the ‘search for a thrill’ in draped courrèges dress with shearling alaïa coat, sparkles in mesh for new york fashion week, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, ‘the abcs of death’: how ant timpson and tim league made a midnight masterclass with 26 horror shorts, ravens, chiefs draw 23-year ratings high in blockbuster nfl opener.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

How to Help Kids Build Character Strengths with Quality Media

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Multicultural Books

YouTube Channels with Diverse Representations

Podcasts with Diverse Characters and Stories

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 10 Reviews
• Kids Say 6 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Film mixes fact, fiction; abuse, nudity, sex, language.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that the film Blonde , based on Joyce Carol Oates' fictional novel about Marilyn Monroe, earned an unusual NC-17 rating in the US because of its sexual content. The content includes a sexual encounter and relationship between Marilyn (played by Ana de Armas) and two men and a graphic oral…

Why Age 17+?

Full-frontal female nudity in one brief scene, and a lot of Marilyn topless. Sex

Adults drink and smoke. Marilyn takes and is given painkillers, sometimes with a

A mother emotionally and physically abuses and attempts to kill her own child; s

"F--k," "s--t," "damn," "hell," "ass," "whore," "c--k," "c--ksuckers," "slut," "

LA sites; Monroe films; the book this film is based on; and media outlets, studi

Any Positive Content?

Marilyn is portrayed as generally lost and exploited or abused by almost everyon

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal female nudity in one brief scene, and a lot of Marilyn topless. Sexual scenes include a threesome between Marilyn and two men, and a graphic oral sex scene (penis isn't shown). Men constantly comment on and admire Marilyn's body.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults drink and smoke. Marilyn takes and is given painkillers, sometimes with alcohol, which causes her to vomit, hallucinate, pass out, and ultimately die. A man appears drunk and violent. Another man is said to have died by choking on his own vomit due to alcoholism.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

A mother emotionally and physically abuses and attempts to kill her own child; she also appears suicidal and is institutionalized in a bleak mental hospital. Men force Marilyn into sexual acts and beat her up. Marilyn undergoes emotionally taxing abortions and miscarriages. A man mentions allegations against the then-president of sexual molestation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

"F--k," "s--t," "damn," "hell," "ass," "whore," "c--k," "c--ksuckers," "slut," "crap," "tramp," "pee," "God," "Jesus."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

LA sites; Monroe films; the book this film is based on; and media outlets, studios, and publications of the time.

Positive Role Models

Marilyn is portrayed as generally lost and exploited or abused by almost everyone she comes in contact with, except her husband Arthur Miller and her trusted make-up artist Whitey, who both treat her with care. She's shown to be more intelligent than people gave her credit for and an exceptionally charismatic and talented actor. She is depicted as scarred from childhood trauma, hard on herself, possibly suffering from inherited mental health issues, and eventually succumbing to painkillers.

Parents need to know that the film Blonde , based on Joyce Carol Oates' fictional novel about Marilyn Monroe, earned an unusual NC-17 rating in the US because of its sexual content. The content includes a sexual encounter and relationship between Marilyn (played by Ana de Armas ) and two men and a graphic oral sex scene where intimate body parts aren't shown but the camera dwells on Marilyn's face during the entire act. Full-frontal female nudity of another character is shown briefly, and there are a lot of scenes with Marilyn topless. There's also sexual violence, including a man in a position of power forcing himself on a young Marilyn. Her mother and one of her husbands are also portrayed as abusive, and Marilyn undergoes abortions and miscarriages. She's portrayed as immensely talented but also traumatized and unstable, and she ultimately becomes addicted to painkillers. She's seen taking these with alcohol and vomiting or losing consciousness and her sense of reality, and ultimately dying. Other adults drink and smoke as well, and one character is said to have died choking on his own vomit. Language includes "f--k," "s--t," "damn," "hell," "ass," "whore," "c--k," "c--ksuckers," "slut," "Jesus," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (10)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 10 parent reviews

the worst movie in the world

Not appropriate for kids., what's the story.

As a young girl, when BLONDE begins, Norma Jean (Lily Fisher) suffers abuse from her unstable mother ( Julianne Nicholson ) and, absent a father in her life, is sent to live in an orphanage. When she grows up, Norma Jean transforms into Marilyn Monroe ( Ana de Armas ), first as a pin-up model and eventually as a movie star and celebrity icon known to millions. But for Norma Jean, Marilyn is a construction, a character she turns on when the cameras light up. The dichotomy of her two personas, and the ways Marilyn is exploited and abused by almost everyone around her, ultimately wear Norma Jean down. She's unsuccessful in her constant search for a father figure and someone to respect and love her for who she is when the cameras are turned off. Norma Jean can't escape Marilyn, so Marilyn must escape.

Is It Any Good?

Director Andrew Dominik has crafted an ambitious and daring but overly long fictionalized biopic centered around a remarkable lead performance from Ana de Armas. Dominik clearly intended for Blonde to overwhelm and even feel cruel at times, ostensibly to mirror the life experiences of the fictionalized Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean. De Armas is excellent in the role, embodying Marilyn to a tee. If anyone complains about her (very slight) Cuban accent, just remind them of the countless times American actors have played other nationalities. But this Monroe is essentially one-note: she's anxious, vulnerable, emotionally tortured, always unsatisfied, abused, and misunderstood. She moves from man to man (calling them all "daddy") and seems on the constant verge of a nervous breakdown.

Many scenes in Blonde are both fantastical and intentionally provocative. The film is narratively and visually inventive, including a sex scene where bodies appear to be floating, stretching, and melting, or camera angles meant to be looking out from inside a vagina or a toilet. Camera angles, focus, color, and sound all conjure Marilyn's mindset and mood. Some of these techniques are quite effective and memorable, others just feel showy and more about form than content. Ultimately, for the viewer, less would have been more. At almost three hours long, the exercise is exhausting. Perhaps we are meant to feel as disoriented and drained as this fictionalized Marilyn, who asks where dreams end and madness begins?

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the ethical issues involved in fictionalizing the lives of real people, as in Blonde . Where can you go to find out which parts of this movie are based on fact and which parts are made up? How do you think the relatives of the real people portrayed here might react?

What do you think of the choice of Ana de Armas to play Marilyn Monroe? Did she look, sound, and behave like Monroe? How do you think an actor prepares to play a real or famous person?

What other films have you watched that were longer than two or two and a half hours? What are the pros and cons of cutting films down to a more typical two hours?

This film received an unusual NC-17 rating. Do you think that was justified? Why or why not?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : September 28, 2022
• Cast : Ana de Armas , Bobby Cannavale , Adrien Brody
• Director : Andrew Dominik
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female writers
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Book Characters
• Run time : 187 minutes
• MPAA rating : NC-17
• MPAA explanation : some sexual content
• Last updated : March 15, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes

My Week With Marilyn

Some Like It Hot

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Biopic Movies

Biographies, related topics.

• Magic and Fantasy
• Book Characters

Want suggestions based on your streaming services? Get personalized recommendations

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

The Front Room

“The Front Room” is the directorial debut of brothers Max and Sam Eggers (half-brothers of “The Lighthouse” director Robert Eggers, which Max co-wrote). The film is a domestic nightmare set to screen: a psychic stab at the stereotypical horrific mother-in-law with absurdity and surrealism twisting the knife. Set primarily in the confines of the home, this claustrophobic aspect collides with the overstimulation of the monster-in-law’s needy, nitpicking demeanor. The premise proposes a battle of wits and control via a brewing storm between the two leads that never really comes to pass. 

Belinda (Brandy Norwood) is a non-tenured professor at a local college, and treated as an adjunct, fails to find fulfillment and recognition in her position. The fact of her very pregnant belly, and the consequence of an upcoming maternity leave, does little to assist in the upward mobility she desperately desires, and she quits. Her public defender husband, Norman (Andrew Burnap), is a tender support system for her, but as will later be affirmed through higher stakes, lacks the teeth to rally behind his wife with anything more than some less-than-confident words of affirmation. With Belinda’s fresh unemployment and a public defender’s salary expected to hold up an expecting household, the couple struggles to find footing amidst the financial stress. 

When Norman’s estranged father dies, with high levels of trepidation and discomfort, they attend the funeral and reunite with his highly religious, equally estranged step mother-in-law, Solange (Kathryn Hunter). With the couple cornered between the overbearing weight of her presence and that of the pastor, Solange offers to pay off their mortgage and leave them as the sole beneficiaries of her will, but only if they take her in to live out what is left of her life. Norman recoils, but with a baby on the way and their bank accounts below deck, Belinda pushes back, asserting that the pros must outweigh the cons, declaring that all too familiar “she can’t be that bad.” And so, she is moved into the front room of the couple’s home, giving the film its name.

“The Front Room” takes time to settle in narratively and tonally, leaving the viewer waiting to figure out what exactly they’re watching. While genre isn’t the determinant of the film’s efficacy, the duration spent weighing their loyalty to the absurd is confounding. However, once the Eggers Brothers make their choice, they revel in it. Frankly, “The Front Room’s” primary storytelling avenue is silliness. The tension that the film’s marketing would lead you to expect doesn’t much exist. In part, this is on account of the one-beat characters who leave nothing much to surprise. Solange is the worst feasible old person. She is disrespectful, needy, racist, conniving, and ungrateful. She will go to any length to drive a wedge between Belinda and Norman, including intentional incontinence (which plays a major part in the film’s gross-out humor). 

There’s a clear throughline between the infant on the way and the paradoxical elderly baby they’ve taken on. The aforementioned incontinence (from feces to spit up and all in between) to the childish antics of Solange’s behavior drive the film’s humor and stakes. It’s effective about half of the time and heavy-handed the rest. Still, without Hunter’s devotion, “The Front Room” would be a hollow tale. Hunter brings her premier physical performance (“The Tragedy of Macbeth” being arguably her strongest showcase) to what otherwise feels like faded ink on the page, helmed by lackluster supporting performances. Norwood, who shares the screen in equal measure, is incredibly flat, delivering lines with obligatory conviction and little nuance. Belinda’s writing evolves from pushover to stalwart adversary at the drop of a hat. Burnap’s childish timidity is believable but ultimately humdrum, as his character lacks any arc or backbone. 

Belinda’s previous miscarriage is a too-slight, underutilized quality within the story. But it’s worth noting for the ways it contributes to the film’s ideas about motherhood and how power contributes to making a house a home. Yet all things considered, the shallow depth of the script and the flimsy performances feel like the consequential background to make way for platforming Solange’s bodily hijinks and audacious commentary. “The Front Room” is a bold, provocative debut, and there’s respect to be had for the Eggers brothers committing to the bit (even as it tires out). It’s passable for an easy watch and some uncomfortable chuckles but is bearable only on behalf of Hunter’s loyal antagonism while falling short just about everywhere else.

Peyton Robinson

Peyton Robinson is a freelance film writer based in Chicago, IL. 

• Brandy Norwood as Belinda
• Andrew Burnap as Norman
• Kathryn Hunter as Solange
• Neal Huff as Pastor Lewis
• David Manis as Old Man
• Mary Catherine Wright as Old Woman
• Ellen J. Maddow as 2nd Old Woman
• Mary Testa as Mary

Leave a comment

Now playing.

We Live in Time

Look Into My Eyes

Matt and Mara

The Thicket

The Mother of All Lies

The Paragon

My First Film

Don’t Turn Out the Lights

I’ll Be Right There

The Greatest of All Time

Latest articles.

TIFF 2024: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Sharp Corner, The Quiet Ones

TIFF 2024: Dahomey, Bird, Oh Canada

TIFF 2024: The Cut, The Luckiest Man in America, Nutcrackers

The Telluride Tea: My Diary of the 2024 Telluride Film Festival

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

‘40 Acres’ Review: Danielle Deadwyler and Michael Greyeyes Make a Post-Apocalyptic Power Couple

TIFF 2024: This flawed yet fascinating look at life after collapse has more on its mind

There is a good chance that if Danielle Deadwyler was actually faced with an apocalypse, she’d be able to navigate the chaos of it all with the same poise that she does in “40 Acres.”

At least, her latest resolute-yet-vulnerable performance certainly makes the case for it. Alongside the great Michael Greyeyes, she gives this post-apocalyptic family drama a sense of gravity just as she is able to leap into action when bloody battles ensue.

Though Deadwyler has already gained acclaim for her work on everything from “ Till ” to this year’s “ The Piano Lesson ,” “40 Acres” lets her flex other genre muscles while never missing a step in her acting. Even as she’s been outstanding in the series “ Station Eleven ,” which was also about the end of the world, this newest project is more confined while still having plenty to chew on about civilization’s collapse. 

Specifically, it’s a film about historical dispossession, the way this echoes into a potential future crisis, and what it takes to survive in a harsh world. Is there room for community and care when everyone is at each other’s throats in what was already a painful existence? Perhaps just as importantly, can Deadwyler take down a pack of goons with guns? The first question remains the main point of thematic tension with no easy answers as we follow a family struggling to find a way forward together. The second can be answered clearly: you bet your ass she can. 

The film, which premiered Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival, takes place in a future Canada where everything has crumbled. An opening introduction of text informs us that plagues and wars have forever upended the world, making farmland more valuable than ever as food is scarce. That’s why the Freemans keep to themselves, tending to land that has been in their family for generations. Hailey (Deadwyler) is a veteran and tough matriarch who is keeping everyone together, but she does so while holding the rest of the world at bay. Though she puts on a strong face for her children, we can see how this takes a toll on her as she listens to radio broadcasts from struggling people while drinking alone. In Deadwyler’s eyes, we see many lifetimes of pain and struggle that have hardened into a shell Hailey rarely lets down. While “40 Acres” can be shaky in its dialogue and staging, it’s her performance that keeps it moving. 

Alongside Hailey is Galen (Greyeyes) who helps to train their children to repel attackers — which they do as a killer team in an efficient opening action sequence that leaves no survivors. This rattles the eldest son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor), who begins to wander out into the world beyond their fence, discovering unexpected connection along with danger. When danger then comes knocking at the family’s home, they’re forced to question what they have built just as they must fight harder than ever to prevent it from being torn apart.

As helmed by writer-director R.T. Thorne, who is making his feature debut after primarily working in television, the premise is merely a means by which to explore greater questions about family, history and loss. Whatever is lost in world-building is gained in the greater complexity devoted to character.

For Hailey and Galen, a Black woman and an Indigenous man, this is not the first time they’ve faced threats from those who wish to take everything from them. This informs all of the ways that they engage with the world, with Deadwyler and Greyeyes each giving humanity to the duo through the smallest of details. It isn’t just in the training to defend their home, but in the little rituals they’ve created for themselves in order to remain connected emotionally despite their isolation. 

Greyeyes, a perpetually underrated performer who’s been great in everything from the fraught film “ Wild Indian ” to the regrettably canceled sitcom “ Rutherford Falls ,” brings plenty of humor and heart to Galen. Not only would “40 Acres” make a fun double feature with the actor’s previous film “Blood Quantum,” but it sees him handling similarly rich thematic material. We feel all of Galen’s fear just as we do his fortitude, with him getting the best action scene of the film.

There aren’t many surprises lurking in the darkness of “40 Acres,” though. At multiple points, characters will seem most certainly down and out with no way to survive, only for someone else to intervene at the last second. It’s very much an action movie standby that the film leans heavily on, making it nearly buckle under the weight that it puts on it. What ensures it still gets up and keeps moving are the rest of the pieces of the film. Yes, the performances are all great, but it’s also the way that Thorne is patient in how he lets them work. Whenever it feels like the film might not be able to overcome the genre tropes that it starts to dance around, his willingness to let everything else breathe provides much-needed exhales.

When things get bloody and violent, the filmmaker doesn’t hold back as the grim prospect of cannibals grows increasingly present, though there are also plenty of more quiet moments, as well. And even as the world and movie writ large may fall into chaos, Deadwyler is undeniable once more. She fights for every inch of the film’s emotional ground and comes away with it all in her hands.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election results
• Google trends
• AP & Elections
• U.S. Open Tennis
• Paralympic Games
• College football
• Auto Racing
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Movie Review: Bring your global entry card — ‘Beetlejuice’ sequel’s a soul train ride to comedy joy

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Michael Keaton in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Michael Keaton in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Justin Theroux, left, and Winona Ryder in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jenna Ortega in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jenna Ortega, left, and Winona Ryder in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Monica Bellucci in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

• Copy Link copied

“I have global entry!”

Now, does that sound like a funny line? Of course it doesn’t. Whatever in the history of mankind and airport lines could be funny about global entry?

But put it in the mouth of comedy goddess Catherine O’Hara, and place it in the singularly inventive world of Tim Burton and that wacky afterlife waiting room from “Beetlejuice,” and it may become the one blessed time in your life you’ll ever guffaw about global entry.

It likely won’t be the only thing you’ll guffaw about. Burton is back — and, more significantly, he is BACK — with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ,” 36 years after the original. And for once, the question “Why a sequel?” is moot.

Not because we know the answer. (Do we?) But, who cares? It’s funny. It may even make you feel better about, well, death, though not “death death.” And Michael Keaton somehow looks exactly the same as he did in 1988 (to be fair, it helps that his character was already dead.)

Returning to his tale of Keaton’s ghostly, fiendish “bio-exorcist,” director Burton brings back much of the team behind the original, including, alongside O’Hara and Keaton, the still-lovely Winona Ryder as Lydia the Goth Girl (also, Bob the shrunken-head guy).

And we’ve gained Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe, and for the younger generation, Jenna Ortega, who, as a relatively normal figure, serves as an appealing anchor, her story moving the plot along.

Speaking of plot: if you didn’t see the original, not to worry. It all gets explained (as much as it should be ) in time. We begin in Winter River, Connecticut, still home to Lydia Deetz (Ryder), who came as a teenager with batty stepmom Delia and dad Charles, only to learn her new house was haunted by the recently deceased Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, alas not back).

Justin Theroux and Winona Ryder in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Lydia looks much the same — dressed all in black, with spiky bangs and pale skin — but is now a widowed mother, a psychic mediator, and host of a cheesy reality show, “Ghost House,” in which she sees ghosts and asks, “Can the living and the dead co-exist?”

But one day she sees something in the audience that scares her: visions of Beetlejuice, who wrought havoc when she was a teen and who, when we last left him, was wasting away in the afterlife waiting room (apparently, HE did not have global entry.)

Waiting just off set to comfort Lydia after this terrifying vision is her manager and boyfriend, Rory (Theroux), who has a little ponytail almost as smarmy as himself.

Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Lydia then gets a concerning message from Delia (O’Hara), an artist of questionable talent and unquestionable ego, who’s mounting a gallery show in which she herself is the canvas. There, Delia tells Lydia that she’s lost Charles. “Is he divorcing you?” gasps Lydia. “What a horrible thought!” replies Delia. “No, he’s dead.” (Such lines are catnip for O’Hara, a genius of comic timing).

Lydia calls her daughter, Astrid (Ortega), at boarding school. Astrid lists Lydia in her contacts as “Alleged Mom,” which tells you much of what you need to know about their fraught relationship.

But let’s pause this account of the living, because we also have to catch you up on the dead. Down where Beetlejuice is stuck, where the dead live — but not the “dead dead” —- Delores, Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, has escaped from the crates (emphasis on plural) in which her body has resided. Watching the glamorous Bellucci literally staple herself together is just one of the glorious creative moments Burton and crew give us here. Alas, Delores doesn’t have much else to do, but this is rather spectacular.

Michael Keaton in a scene from “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” (Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

We’re approaching spoiler territory, so let’s just say that things really get complicated when Astrid goes home to Winter River for her father’s funeral. There, she watches as Mom accepts a marriage proposal from smarmy Rory. Racing off to escape, Astrid runs into a cute young guy reading Dostoyevsky.

A relationship begins, one that will lead to unexpected mayhem. Let’s just say Lydia will need to call upon — gasp! — Beetlejuice, who will exact a fearsome price for his services, as he is wont to do.

And he appears none too soon. Keaton, in his white caked makeup and blackened eyes and hair that looks like he is perpetually sticking his hand into a plug in the wall, slips remarkably smoothly into his old role. “The juice is loose,” as he likes to say.

But you know who’s also got the juice flowing? Burton. It’s his inimitable energy that infuses this movie — a joyously rendered sequel that sometimes makes sense, and sometimes doesn’t, but just keeps rollicking. Among the ridiculous delights along the way: A “soul train” in the afterlife, which is not only literally a train of souls, but a replica of the variety show “Soul Train,” with people in Afros dancing their way to wherever they are going.

And if we don’t have the lip-synced “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” from the original, we do have a lip-synced “MacArthur Park,” the Donna Summer version. “Someone left the cake out in the rain,” go the ridiculous words of the disco classic. “I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again.”

In the Burtonian spirit, let’s just say it took a long time to bake it, yes, but the director has recovered the recipe — at least enough to make us smile, chortle, even guffaw, for 104 minutes. And we can be happy with that.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association “for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use.” Running time: 104 minutes. Three stars out of four.