Blonde (2022-Netflix) Yep, I'm way late in catching up with this one.....as I try to inhale as many Oscar nominees as are available to me......
(But I'm resigned to waiting for Cameron's 'Blue People Go Underwater' to eventually park itself on Disney Plus and/or Blu-Ray, where I'll be free to pause it for pee breaks during its 3 plus hours.....)
First question to answer.....is Ana de Armas a serious contender for Best Actress? Sure, she's got a shot at it, even though up against the towering Cate Blanchett and the perceived front runner, Michele Yeoh (for whom the zeitgeist proclaims this is her year...) (I won't even bother including Andrea Whats-her-name and Michele Williams, who's been jammed into this category even though strictly a supporting player in "The Fablemans")
The movie? A tortured, tortuous culture-vulture, Felllini-esque slog though the swamp of fact and fiction surrounding Marilyn Monroe's life.
Paced like an oil painting and pretentious to the max, it's a warped, funhouse-mirror version of Monroe's mostly misery-strewn 36 years on earth, , falsely juiced up with soft-porn sex and Cronenberg-ian body horror....
Keep in mind, the film takes its inspiration from 'Blonde' a Joyce Carol Oates novel that swirls together well-known public news with the writer's completely fictitious impressions of Monroe and her place in the pop culture firmament. Personally, I would've hired Quentin Tarantino to tell this story, since he would 've let Marilyn overcome her neuroses and addictions to live a long and fulfilling life a collecting multiple Lifetime Achievement awards......
Ana de Armas's superb work exists not within some kind of docu-drama, but rather a slow moving horror movie, which admittedly adheres to the overall trajectory of Monroe's spiral into an early grave.....though. grossly exaggerating or downright falsifying the actual facts of it.
Writer-director Andrew Dominik does impressively re-create Norma Jean Baker's excruciating trip into the meat grinder of the Hollywood studio star--making machinery (including anal rape by 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck) and her predictably doomed marriages to baseball legend p Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller. (competently enacted by Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody)
But Dominik fancies himself something of a fabulist artiste.......so we're treated to the ridiculous spectacles of chatty fetuses within Monroe's womb and even a camera angle from inside her vagina. And virtually all the dramatic scenes in the film are staged with an affected torpor that Dominik must have thought added additional gravitas to his direction. I does not.
All this director accomplishes....he .makes you check your watch to see when it's all over. A lot.
For Ana de Armas' performance, 4 stars (****). For the film itself, 1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)......undone by its phony-baloney, film-festival pandering.
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