Critics reviews

Blonde tries to deny who she was in order to tell us who she was, punishing her to punish us. The math does not check out, and it shows.

It takes some very big swings, and aside from a strong performance by Ana de Armas as Marilyn, it misses almost all of them... It doesn’t make much of an attempt to tell the story factually, and the liberties it takes with the truth make little sense.

Dominik has created his own dark-flipside version of the Norma Jeane/Marilyn bifurcation, perhaps almost too neatly: The movie is both a daring and empathetic deconstruction of Monroe iconography anchored by a beautiful performance from de Armas, as well as a miserabilist wallow in exploitation.

The movie’s surfaces are impeccable: If you love period films and old-Hollywood costume design, it’s worth seeing for those elements alone... Yet the portraits it offers of its characters never peer beneath those surfaces. Over and over the movie hits the same emotional note: Poor Marilyn. It’s a legitimate emotional response to what was self-evidently a tragic life, but the grinding sameness also makes for a miserabilist slog.

“Blonde” abuses and exploits Marilyn Monroe all over again, the way so many men did over the cultural icon’s tragic, too-short life. Maybe that’s the point, but it creates a maddening paradox: condemning the cruelty the superstar endured until her death at 36 while also reveling in it. And yet writer/director Andrew Dominik’s film... remains technically impeccable throughout...

Blonde, then, is the worst kind of feminism, one so absorbed in the desire to “save” a woman that it victimizes her as much as possible to make its redemption of her that much more praiseworthy.

It’s flashy and you never fail to notice it striving for a kind of eternal cinematic greatness... He will be convincingly taken to task for what he chooses to leave out of this story, and his clammy way of sexualizing her, through which he probably intended a sense of candidness. But few films, perhaps to date in the dubious biopic genre, have been made to scandalize, provoke, and show their own very singular kind of empathy as his.

By turns ravishing, moving and intensely irritating, Blonde is, by the end, all a bit much – in every sense... This is a portrait of Monroe that accentuates her suffering and anguish, canonising her into a feminist saint who died for our scopophilic sins, that we might feast on her beauty and talent.

Technically-skilled, well-acted and fatally over-long, it’s hard not to see Blonde as a chronicle of exploitation and abuse which merrily carries on the tradition... Blonde doesn’t quite dance on her grave, but Dominik, who adapted, does jump on it, covering everyone, audience included, in a grubby film of voyeurism.

Blonde is severe and serious-minded almost to a fault: you rather wonder how many viewers at home will soldier on to the end when it lands on Netflix after a limited theatrical release. In the cinema, though, it swallows you up like an uneasy dream, at once all too familiar and pricklingly unreal.

Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.

This is a nasty, queasy, unforgiving piece of work. It is utterly devoid of hope. It’s as shocking as any slasher, as horrifying as any grizzly bit of wartime realism — yet there’s something so compelling about the director’s broader argument, and it’s rendered with rare visual deftness, with some big swing moments that land terrifically.