Stark moments of abandonment and abuse portend an eerily captivating tale in which Norma Jeane herself wrestles with ideas of parenthood and abortion. It’s a distinctly dreamlike prologue, and all the while, it features jolting, disembodied sounds, like buzzing flies and ringing telephones, mixed a little too loudly, as if they were separate from the image - as if they were noises from the real world, invading your sleeping thoughts, and trying desperately to awaken you from this nightmare that’s sure to end in death, and calls unanswered. A fire rages and consumes all of Los Angeles as Norma Jeane’s mother carries her from their burning home right onto the studio backlot where they appear to live. These introductory scenes play out via sudden pans, zooms, and shifts in space. This plants the bittersweet seeds of stardom deep within Norma Jeane. On her 7th birthday, Norma Jeane’s disturbed single mother, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson), sets her down a lifelong quest by spinning a yarn about her supposedly famous and powerful absentee father, an unnamed actor in Tinseltown. She’s played here by an impressively capable young actress, Lily Fisher, whose engenders heart-wrenching sympathy. The gentle, glamorous tones of composers Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score spotlights hitting Marilyn in slow motion before the story jumps back in time, opening during Norma Jeane’s childhood in 1933. Norma Jeane Baker, or even a story about the fictitious avatar created by Oates, and more like a dream about the world in which Norma Jeane lived, and the private worlds she inhabited, all captured from the inside out. Blonde plays out less like a recounting of the real Marilyn, a.k.a. It’s the kind of raw and unexpectedly non-traditional biopic likely to earn an “F” CinemaScore from casual moviegoers, not unlike Dominik’s previous narrative feature, the pitch-black gangster drama Killing Them Softly (2012). It’s a striking film, and a difficult one, clocking in at 2 hours and 45 minutes of rigorous, emotionally punishing material performed by a stunning Ana de Armas (all wrapped in a light NC-17 rating).
To view Blonde through a factual lens is to miss its point, and to misunderstand its language, even though it exists adjacent to factual history, stringing together a hallucinatory birth-to-death narrative using, as its foundation, iconic photographs of the great Marilyn Monroe, who died tragically at 36. It is not a biography.” The same label could apply to Dominik’s Blonde - based on the fictitious 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates - but in that case, you may as well paste it onto everything from the science-fantasy of Star Wars to the experimental films of Stan Brakhage. 28.Īndrew Dominik’s first film, Chopper (2000), about Australian criminal Mark Brandon Read, begins with an explicit disclaimer: “This film is a dramatization in which narrative liberties have been taken.
16, 2022, before streaming on Netflix on Sept. Blonde will release in select theaters on Sept.
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