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Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde had its premiere at Venice Film Festival – and critics are divided on the new Netflix movie. A fictionalized take on the life of the iconic actor, the movie is directed by Andrew Dominik and based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates.
The movie also stars Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, the playwright and third husband of Monroe, along with Bobby Cannavale as Monroe's second husband Joe DiMaggio and Julianne Nicholson as her mother. But what are the critics saying about the movie? We've got a round-up below.
Total Film
"The way we consume celebrity and the fact that those who burn white-hot in the spotlight are frequently least equipped to deal with the onslaught is at the heart of Blonde, Andrew Dominick’s gorgeous/grotesque adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ fictionalized novel charting Marilyn Monroe’s life.
Though it opens with the intense dazzle of an arc light, the camera pushing in to reveal the mechanical guts of the bulb, Dominick isn’t interested in clinically dissecting the reality behind Monroe’s carefully crafted persona. This is the filmmaker who gave us the dreamy The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, after all. Instead, Blonde creates a mood board of the various narratives the star told herself and the public, inviting audiences to assess their own culpability in the ravenous disassembling of the famous."
Deadline
"That the film works at all is down to the extraordinary performance at the heart of it: Ana de Armas carries the film squarely on her shoulders, depicting Monroe over a period of some 16 years, and the performance – actually more of an interpretation, helped by the actress’s liminal resemblance – is all-in, ferociously emotional but complex in its nuances as it explores the child-like sex symbol’s many paradoxes. Here’s a smart, talented and really quite ambitious actress who would give it all up for a father figure to worship and a baby (the various scenes of miscarriage, not to mention a talking fetus, may well turn off at-home viewers of this Netflix production). But for the brave and the curious, Blonde should prove fascinating, an engrossing slow-motion car wreck of a movie that puts you squarely in the driver’s seat of the oncoming vehicle."
IndieWire
"It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim. To watch any of her movies is to feast on a luminous performer whose intelligence is sublimated beneath a knowingly hypnotic physical affect. Her legacy is still best preserved through her talents, rather than through a film that might as well be another face printed by Andy Warhol’s factory – an X-rayed version, so that instead of bright pop art colors, the stencil is simply of a skull."
The Guardian
"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. Maybe it’s not an opera but a kind of religious ritual for the modern age, visiting the stations of the crosses Monroe bore, the Passion of the Marilyn. Like the Gospels, both the source material and the film were written long after the anointed one worked her miracles, so the Blonde version of the Marilyn story is full of historical distortions, rumours and pure fictional projection."
Variety
"Blonde takes a handful of poetic liberties (as most biopics do). A couple of them don’t quite pan out, but mostly the movie sticks to the literal and spiritual chronology of Marilyn’s life. The film recognizes that Marilyn was one of the greatest of all movie stars because she was, on some level, a genuine artist, but the majority of it takes place away from the limelight. With a passion that’s inquisitive, nearly meditative, and often powerful, Blonde focuses on the mystery we now think of when we think of Marilyn Monroe: Who was she, exactly, as a personality and as a human being? Why did her life descend into a tragedy that seems, in hindsight, as inevitable as it is haunting?"
Blonde arrives on Netflix on September 23. In the meantime, check out our guide to the rest of 2022's most exciting movie release dates.
