{"id":9807,"date":"2023-02-27T16:57:23","date_gmt":"2023-02-27T21:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9807"},"modified":"2023-03-11T20:36:11","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T01:36:11","slug":"blonde","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/27\/blonde\/","title":{"rendered":"Blonde."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blonde<\/em> isn\u2019t just the worst movie I\u2019ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it\u2019s one of the worst movies I\u2019ve ever seen. It\u2019s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, like a teenaged filmmaker\u2019s limited understanding of what it means to be experimental. It also fails at its most important task \u2013 giving the audience an interesting, three-dimensional portrait of its lead character, Marilyn Monroe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film tries to do a cradle-to-grave story, although the script, based on Joyce Carol Oates\u2019 novel of the same name, isn\u2019t going for any sort of accuracy \u2013 most of what\u2019s in this film is made up, often leaning towards the lurid, which you could probably guess quickly by how much time Monroe (Ana de Armas) spends topless for no apparent reason. We see her abusive childhood with a mentally ill mother (Julianne Nicholson, giving maybe the only decent performance in the movie). When she\u2019s removed from her mother\u2019s care to an orphanage, the film jumps forward to her pin-up years, then to a meeting with a studio head who rapes her almost the minute she\u2019s done reading, then through a meandering story that sideswipes the films she made while spending far more time on her tabloid romances, one of her miscarriages, and an abortion that apparently never happened. She meets and marries Joe DiMaggio (played by some actor doing a bad Bobby Cannavale impression), then meets and marries Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), with no chemistry between her and either of these men, and in the case of Miller, no explanation at all of why they ended up together. An ongoing subplot where Monroe receives letters from a man purporting to be her father, whose identity she never knew, ends ridiculously, leading Monroe to take her own life with barbituates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no defending this movie. It\u2019s badly shot, looks bad, poorly acted, and incredibly poorly written, from character to dialogue to pacing. The opening story with Monroe and her mother, which recalls a better-done scene involving Mitzi in The Fabelmans<\/a><\/em>, is disjointed, dark, and features her mother using stilted, bizarre vocabulary that wouldn\u2019t make sense for an adult talking to another adult, let alone a parent talking to a preteen child. The flips between color and black-and-white photography happen without reason, and add nothing to the film. Monroe\u2019s character jokingly asks if she\u2019s just \u201ca piece of meat,\u201d but that is exactly how this movie treats her \u2013 she\u2019s a bag of flesh and bones to be passed around or discussed or ogled, but she has no agency, no depth, no explanation beyond these idiotic Freudian notions that she has daddy issues or desperately needs to be a mother. Even the idea that she wanted to be taken more seriously as an actor is only brought up in passing, where the script just sort of waves to the notion as is drifts on by. Marilyn Monroe in Blonde<\/em> is nothing but a victim of the world. I can\u2019t think of a less generous interpretation of her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are two rape scenes in Blonde<\/em>, the second of which is unspeakably gross and degrading, even beyond what a complete fabrication that particular scene is. The camera focuses its male gaze on de Armas\u2019s face while she is performing oral sex and trying not to gag, and stays there for something like two minutes. It has no artistic intent or merit; it exists to shock. I guess it worked, but it also underscored just how terrible this movie is from conception to execution. I doubt I would ever defend the existence of an on-camera rape scene in any film, but this film\u2019s version is the worst of the worst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Armas does a dutiful impersonation of Monroe, although she can\u2019t entirely lose her Cuban accent (and she\u2019s a lot smaller than Monroe was, which seems a very odd choice given all the efforts to otherwise make people in this movie look like their real-life counterparts). It\u2019s just a dead character, and she isn\u2019t capable of infusing any life into it. Her brief role in No Time to Die<\/em> highlighted how ebullient and energetic she can be on screen; Blonde<\/em> shows that a bad script can leave her a walking doe-eyed corpse. You could argue this isn\u2019t her fault, but giving this performance an Oscar nomination for Best Actress is more an acknowledgement of the fact that she had to suffer through this awful film \u2013 as did everyone who voted for her \u2013 than a measure of actual quality. Giving de Armas a nod over Tilda Swinton (The Eternal Daughter<\/a><\/em>) is a giant farce, and should have garnered way more controversy than the Andrea Riseborough one did. I can think of at least five other lead performances by actresses that would have been more worthy, and I\u2019ve only seen about 36 films from the 2022 Oscar cycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(In no order: Emma Thompson from Good Luck to You,<\/em> Leo Grande<\/em>; Jennifer Lawrence from Causeway<\/a><\/em>; Ruth Wilson from True Things<\/em>; Florence Pugh from The Wonder<\/a><\/em>; and Frankie Corio from Aftersun<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one else fares much better, although there\u2019s a mercy in how many characters we see in that none of them is on screen for very long. The two actors playing Cass Chaplin and Eddy Robinson are the most cringe-inducing, as they\u2019re both doing some kind of impersonation of Skeet Ulrich\u2019s character from Scream<\/em>, right down to the hair (wrong decade, guys), in yet another complete fabrication that in this case informs the movie\u2019s incredibly ill-conceived climax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blonde<\/em> barely qualifies as a movie. It\u2019s an absolute mess. I admit that having not read the book, I may have been unprepared for how far it diverges from history. If I set that aside, however, this movie is still garbage. Norma Jean deserved so much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blonde isn\u2019t just the worst movie I\u2019ve seen from 2022, by a long shot; it\u2019s one of the worst movies I\u2019ve ever seen. It\u2019s a patched-together collection of scenes that barely connect to each other, jumping through aspect ratios and shutter speeds and even from color to black and white with neither rhyme nor reason, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,1332,25,102,215],"class_list":["post-9807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-2023-best-actress-nominees","tag-adaptations","tag-disappointments","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9807"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9808,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9807\/revisions\/9808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}