What is true and what is not about the life of Marilyn Monroe? It’s a question Andrew Dominik’s Blonde—the new, nebulous sort-of biopic of the star—refuses to clarify. Instead, the gray areas, the unknown gaps in her story, are filled in with a make-believe lacquer.
It’s a sumptuous and rule-breaking melodrama, based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates. On the book’s copyright page, Oates wrote that Blonde was “not a biography of Monroe, or even a biographical novel that follows the historical facts of the subject’s life.” Instead, she used Monroe’s life as a vessel for a story about the 20th-century American celebrity. It’s not only about Marilyn Monroe, but about many others too.
Andrew Dominik’s film, which runs a few minutes shy of three hours and has been marred by production controversy, follows much the same path. It opens in 1933: Hollywood is literally on fire, and a young Norma Jeane Mortenson (Lily Fisher) is being driven straight into the flames by her mother, who insists that on the other side of the inferno, they’ll find refuge in the house of Norma Jean’s birth father, an influential industry figure who’s been distant for years. It’s a big metaphor, underscoring the film’s depiction of fame as a dangerous, tumultuous thing that only the luckiest survive; in the end, Norma Jeane and her mother have to turn back.
From that point onward, Monroe is played by Ana de Armas, in the kind of haunting and transformative role that should garner awards buzz. As she moves through a series of lovers and husbands, almost every significant man in her life is dubiously nicknamed “Daddy,” from the boxer Joe DiMaggio to the playwright Arthur Miller. Still, the almost cosmic power that she has over people is clear, whether they’re her partners—who seem consistently enraptured and then repulsed by her beauty—or her ravenous fans on the street, whom we see only sparingly.
These scenes are stitched together like photographic vignettes, shifting from black-and-white into color, and changing aspect ratio. Dominik has spoken of his desire to replicate existing photographs of Monroe in near surreal detail, but beneath their facile beauty, each moment explores or guides us toward the key things that plagued Monroe: the perils of the public eye; the stolen autonomy that feels par for the course for a woman in Hollywood. “The circle of light is yours,” Monroe repeats when the paparazzi cameras flash, capturing her perfect smile. Later, when a flashlight shines down on her pale body, splayed in preparation for an abortion performed against her will, she’ll say the same thing.
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