Blonde is a Fundamental Failure

Andrew Dominic is a man of few films a director who generally likes to take a lot of time on his narrative work which has had a reputation of initially underperforming but being eventually reclaimed on account of its technically meticulous merits he's probably best known for the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford which explores the relationship between a public figure in American Mythos and their life divorced from Legend it's also probably the work most thematically married to Dominic's latest film blonde if you somehow didn't know what blonde was after all the buzz about its NC-17 rating or its polarizing debut at Venice then you probably know it from the damning interview Dominic did with Christina Newland which recently came out and made quite the splash his comments which are at best dismissive and at worst downright scornful outline some of the thinking behind the movie's more head scratching qualities and illuminated how his approach set itself up for failure from its very conception this is a film that like the Joyce carolotes book it's adapting sets out to explore below the psyche of Marilyn Monroe or rather to use Monroe as a vehicle for a more Universal psychological exploration tracking the process of how someone who not just on the surface but deeply ingrained in the public Consciousness lived an ideal life could actually be isolated enough to kill herself there's an idea here of linearly tracking the progress of childhood trauma and depression as an entity and then kind of separately there's an idea of the circumstances made up or otherwise of Marilyn Monroe or rather Norma Jean's life this is told through stunningly impressionistic set pieces with shifting aspect ratios and color profiles which I was at a bit of a loss to understand the motivation for during the screening specifically the color and aspect ratio stuff I kept trying to come up with Beats in Norma Jean's Arc that could have Justified these flourishes but no reading I could come up with had any legs or proved to be consistent with what I was watching come to find out the shots that are black and white were because the photos they were recreating were black and white the shots that are 4x3 we're recreating 4x3 photos etc etc and I think this is the root of the problem they were very careful marketing this film as I imagine they were the book to clarify that this is a fictional portrait of Marilyn Monroe which makes sense to thwart any expectation of biopic conventions again she's but a figurehead for this story about parental absence and adulthood isolation it's a risky choice but if executed correctly as has been done before in similar approaches could make the pursuit pay off but you'd think in this case it would be a little counter-intuitive to be so meticulous about recreating these images down to the minute physical details and more importantly to justify the visual language as I don't know that's just how it really was especially considering anode armas was also directed to tailor her performance to whichever speech patterns were documented of Monroe at a given time and not so much what would be consistent with the character's emotions at the time the theory here is presumably that Monroe's real life speech patterns would have inherently reflected which she was going through but for a fictional or at the very least embellished or curated Arc imprinted onto Monroe it just doesn't make a lot of sense to use such a rigidly archival foundation so it's not exactly a fictional story about Marilyn Monroe but an attempt to present these real advertised images of her in a way that calls us to look into them and see the speculated Spirit of Norma Jean within them this is the dichotomy Dominic is trying to explore but it's also what's at odds with each other about the film Jesse James does something similar to much better success it's more or less a conventional Slow Burn Western tracking Robert Ford's Ark and a bit of a tall tale about Jesse James but it's framed with this clinical narration that sounds like a Museum tour guide and this device gives the film a display case quality that's at once a story and a statement about storytelling and that statement about storytelling and myth-making actively plays into Ford's psyche and causes the story itself to play out the way it does so the two inform and enrich each other this irony does not play in blonde probably because it can't decide what it wants to be Jesse James is a mostly straight empathetically told and shot film with these more meta book endings whereas blonde lands in a strange uncanny Territory between the two by trying to do both things at once at all times neither successful satire of these images nor straight face tragedy if nothing else this misallocation of resources means that the adult psyche we experience is pretty surface level a causal relationship is drawn between parental absence and sexual promiscuity which is the real element that both Fosters her success and compromises her relationships but we don't get to the truth of what's going on in Norma Jean's head the extent of her headspace manifested is calling all the men in her life Daddy and talking to the fetus of her unborn child as she was told as a kid that her birth was the very reason for her father's absence and consequently her mother's the film is asking a lot of an audience all too familiar with its subject zeroing in on only the most brutal aspects of her life and because of the narrative purpose behind this there was a path where these Liberties would have real tragic consequence but because the character is whittled down to such a one note Persona and then the empty visuals convey next to nothing psychological we're left with a three-hour lowest blows compilation I don't think there's an obligation to show Marilyn Monroe being a girl Boss by any means but the more uplifting moments of her life would have at least provided some variety and possibly even more contrast to what Norma Jean is feeling coming to a more nuanced portrayal of depression and for a film in such active conversation with the way films have problematically portrayed Marilyn Monroe in the past some inkling of self-awareness or grasp of tone could have accounted for all this the CGI fetus scenes are shot with a 2001 reverence and I frankly can't decide if playing it straight makes the conversation more ironic reframing the conversation ironically Would Have Made It play better but clearly Dominic sees nothing ironic or absurd in these scenes asserting only Pathos and showing the fetus this is one of the Myriad instances where he demonstrates his lack of awareness and honestly command of the material despite how much command he has of the camera at my screening there was one single moment that got an audible reaction from the crowd and it was this goofy snory camshot of Bobby cannavali that got a decent laugh which I don't think Dominic intended take blonde's other big influence fire walk with me it somehow still manages to lean into the staple Twin Peaks eccentricity despite all its elements building to a conclusion that renders it possibly David Lynch's most depressing movie this gives us a more varied emotional palette that serves as a base for that depression to bleed into which also allows for the sincere reverence for Laura the film ends on Dominic is certainly an Earnest filmmaker but his bludgeoning approach only shows reverence for the other movies it's trying to emulate be it the explicit satirical Recreations or the film's formic influences and that's to say nothing of the fact that fire walk with me use is absurd visual ideas with no concrete meaning to them to build an internal logic that still evokes these feelings unwittingly blonde is nothing but foe impressionism a series of images that scream at you to feel something but fail to Foster any real emotion and which Dominic esoterically impresses meaning onto and because that intellectual backing is even itself so shoddy there's no Saving Grace here you can pause the movie at any given point and look at something nice and that's about it what we have on our hands here is a film whose gamble did not pay off but hey I am but one man my links are in the description thanks for watching and goodbye

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 127,078

Keywords: Blonde, Marilyn Monroe, Norma jeane, Andrew dominik, Netflix, Ana de armas, Bobby cannavale, Adrien Brody, Christina newland

Id: 0GzB9tHzU5E

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2022