BOMBSHELL IN CONTEXT

ARMAS CLEARS HER BACKSTORY FOR FAMOUS FILM ACTOR ROLE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The newest biographical take on one of the most memorable pop culture symbols highlights the real problem of films loosely based on a thin skeleton of biographical material.

Director Andrew Dominik puts the truth on the face of the narrative but the camera leaves no mistake that the film is equal parts art and truth in Blonde (2022).

The truth runs a dotted line down the course of the narrative with just enough psychanalyses fussed into the art for people to make inferences and draw a connection to their own real life experiences.

The script is less about the truth of protagonist Marilyn Monroe than the life of Norma Jean as a personification of Californication.

Ana de Armas creates a masterpiece in her interpretation of Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe, based on the fictional novel by Joyce Carol Oates. 

Armas may have provided the only reliable truth worth telling about Marilyn Monroe with the actor masking her previous performances with those sympathetic doll eyes and emotive facial gestures for which Monroe is so recognizable.

The very public life has left enough of a historical record onto which can be tethered a lot of fiction. The three marriages are true although many might have already forgotten about the first one.

The 2 hr and 46 m runtime goes by fast just as time seems to have quickly fallen away in Hollywood because of the variety of scenes created and strung together just before the point of resembling clutter picked up from the cutting room floor.

The biopic film seems partly influenced by actor and film producer Brad Pitt. Pitt signed onto the project with his film production company, Plan B Entertainment Inc. Dominik creates several esoteric scenes about the formation of life similar to another Plan B production, The Tree of Life (2013), starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain.

Dominik has also used the slow grinding story telling he used when directing Pitt and Casey Affleck in the biopic of United States outlaw Jesse James, in The Assassination of Jesse James (2007). The film is also a Plan B production.

The underlining psychodrama is created in a more transparent fashion, though, for the most beautiful person in the world at the time of her super stardom during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

The slow grinding complexities of an inner psychology are connected to the mother-daughter relationship, with no father being present, and Norma Jeane wanting to become a mother but with which she was unsuccessful because her movie career was in the way.

Dominik, the screen writer, and one would assume, Oates, the novelist, depict the rising star as an ordinary person struggling in young adulthood to find her identity with family, celebrity and her screen characters complicating matters. Armas occasionally metaphorically throws up her hands in exasperation to exclaim about her movie persona, “that is not who I am”, or about her celebrity persona: “What am I, a piece of meat?”

Armas creates the legend as the public knows her on the outside, but the talented actor also provides the private person on the inside that many fans may have only been able to wonder about.

The storyline begins with Lily Fisher performing the young Norma Jeane as a toddler, while Julianne Nicholson plays the single mother, Gladys. Gladys turns out to be a bit of tyrant, driven by that lethal cocktail of alcoholism and mental illness.

Gladys reveals that she had been so poor that she had to put Norma Jeane to sleep in a drawer because she could not afford a baby crib.

The director shows good overall vision by then making scenes opening and closing like moments in the drawer while a voiceover is added like someone walking around the room commenting on the life occurring in the ether. These images are revisited as partial wraparounds for part one and part two and part three of a historical footprint.

The most beautiful woman in the world at the time was also subject to the casting couch, with the inference made that she was discovered but became more favored by producers as a result.

Dan Butler is cast well as Norma Jeane’s agent, I.E Shinn.

While Armas is clearly the center of attention, that camera focus does not become overbearing because of the interest created in the film art that surrounds her, including great works by Bobby Cannavale as Monroe’s second husband, baseball hero, Joe DiMaggio, and Adrian Brody as Monroe’s third husband, American playwright, Arthur Miller.

Many scenes are influenced by the black and white photography that was in vogue during the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Background and foreground sounds of traffic, rustling script paper, overhead incandescent lights and even the slurping of drinks give the film an added documentary tone that suggests this story is the real private story of Marilyn Monroe.

Dominik has made another movie meant to make the audience feel what the characters feel. Blonde is an introspective psychodrama juxtaposing the young starlit’s eagerness to find work, with the movie moguls taking everything they can out of actors through the old production studio system. 

This motif is given an extra wrinkle when drugs and alcohol begin to affect Monroe’s perceptions.

The narrative does take on the added complexities of trying to tell the career retrospective – instead of a single event biopic like My Week with Marilyn (2011), starring Michelle Williams and Eddie Redmayne. But Dominik fantastically makes the film seem about a single event – a dreamscape or dip into the subconscious strung together by the importance of relationships in family and career and the damaging effects of dysfunction in those relationships.

Marilyn has no father, having been born out of wedlock at a time when that was not so accepted in society, then becomes abandoned by an alcoholic mother with mental health issues, and then eventually abused in a series of short, star hopping relationships.

Marilyn’s marriage with playwright Arthur Miller goes well until a miscarriage. And then Marilyn’s abuse of prescription drugs and alcohol make everything go even further sideways as her behaviour becomes unpredictable and nihilistic.

Some viewers may find the film disturbing with the presentation of a kind of declassified look at the famous sex symbol that includes a CGI recreation of inside her uterus during an abortion procedure. And a few scenes are produced in bad taste.

Life is difficult though, and if depictions of the life changing struggles continue to be glossed over, the struggle to survive will remain a struggle.

Ultimately the film blends story telling with a gritty reality to provoke emotional responses and make people think about the important issues humanity faces today.

The casting couch is a recuring theme in the script about a famous movie star in the studio system several decades before the public outcry against the exchange of sex for movie star roles. 

Dominik portrays these scenes as non-consensual sex with Marilyn all teary eyed at the indignity of it all.

Norma Jeane wants to be a movie star, sex symbol but then she complains about being treated like a “piece of meat” by everybody involved, including United States President John F. Kennedy.

Blonde nears the end of the first run of a new line of films coming out of Hollywood that are designed to provoke emotions and thought with often disturbing images, and by telling stories with esoteric art as much as with actors and acting. Audiences have experienced the violence of the action flick, but the classified information hidden in the bottom drawer that is protected by privacy rights and the inaccessibility of internal monologues is much more impactful, although still traumatizing, than any munitions on the human psyche.

Blonde is streaming on Netflix.