Blonde is no simple Marilyn Monroe biopic – it has tricks up every sleeve

Blonde ★★★★
(R 18+) 167 minutes

Andrew Dominik’s version of the life and death of Marilyn Monroe is just that: his version. He based it on the 700-plus page novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published in 2001. That was her version. Dominik has worked on the project since at least 2010.

Adrien Brody as The Playwright (aka Arthur Miller), with Marilyn in a rare moment of contentment.Credit:Netflix

It’s prudent to accept none of it as fact until you do some reading. Then it is clear that it’s a hybrid, like any number of movies by Oliver Stone or the superb James Ellroy novel American Tabloid, a speculation based on a writer’s freedom to interpret and invent. In a book, this is largely accepted as a right of creativity, but in a movie, it runs headlong into the literal nature of the medium. People see, people believe, so you better not trick them!

Some of the audience is far more sophisticated than that and some would not recognise irony if it bit them on the posterior. Dominik, perhaps the most gifted Australian director of his generation (Chopper, Killing Me Softly, The Assassination of Jesse James), directs for the former – and he’s nothing if not a trickster.

This movie has visual aces up every sleeve. It glides from gorgeous black and white to colour and back again in the same scene, stretches faces and mouths to give a sense of Marilyn’s brittle hold on reality and throws together impossible moments to make a point, confident that we will get it.

When Marilyn starts to miscarry on a beach with third husband Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), there was no posse of photographers present, as we see here. Most of us can see it’s a metaphor. The lush score by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave keeps us suspended, as if in a dream.

The famous subway grate scene from Seven-Year Itch, one of many iconic images recreated in the film.Credit:Matt Kennedy/Netflix

A lot of American critics have taken exception. While acknowledging its visual invention and Ana de Armas’ superb performance, they say it’s too vulgar, too miserable, too exploitative. Just too damn much.

Some said similar things about Raging Bull in 1980. It may take time for Blonde to be recognised for the astonishing piece of work that it is. Or not. Times and tolerances have changed. Blonde shows Marilyn being sexually abused on numerous occasions; the depiction of such horrors is now subject to censorious impulses in the culture.

It counts her abortion as part of this sexual abuse, with leering doctors and speculums as instruments of torture: again, more taboos not just smashed, but satirised, with a view from inside the vulva! More controversially, it shows her submitting to her own humiliation, most wretchedly in a scene with Jack Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson) that turns the stomach.

We must assume that Dominik loves and pities Norma Jeane Baker, the abused child who becomes a fearful young woman of great potential, as opposed to the sexual siren that was Marilyn Monroe. If so, why subject Norma to such humiliations? The argument is that Dominik exploits Marilyn all over again when he shows her being rammed from behind by the first studio head she meets. If the whole world saw only Marilyn, the creature that Norma Jeane comes to hate, why does Dominik keep his camera running when a suggestion would suffice?

The answer might be that it’s not just a film about Norma Jeane or Marilyn. It’s about the culture that created and destroyed her and the country in which this festering impulse was acceptable. In short, it’s a film about American depravity – another reason American critics might not love it.

I share some of their reservations. The film has no off switch. That’s part of Dominik’s desire to shake us up. It’s discomforting, but that’s not a bad thing. So was Raging Bull, a film with which it bears comparison. Where Scorsese embraced violence as a metaphor for America, Dominik replaces it with sexual dystopia.

It’s an overwhelming experience – both horrible and sad, sympathetic and sneering. Some have called it “miserablist”, showing none of the joy that Norma Jeane must have had at times. That’s there, if you look for it. It’s a towering achievement, just not a pleasant one – a maelstrom of emotions and effects, like trying to look through a kaleidoscope while being thrown about in a dodgem car.

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