Ana de Armas inBlonde(2022).Photo: Netflix
One critic, ahead of the film’s Netflix release, said she had made the decision not to coverBlondeat all.
“I’m not covering #Blonde in any capacity,” Grace Randolph wrote inTwitterin July. “I think an NC-17 violent fantasy about #MarilynMonroe presenting itself as a biography - or even if it was upfront about being a fantasy - is pretty appalling.”
In a review fromTheWashington Post, Ann Hornaday called the film a “breathtakingly misguided adaptation” of the 2000novel.
Hornaday, who gave the film a single star, wrote thatBlonde"not only re-objectifies Monroe but revels in her victimization and self-abnegation."
Matt Kennedy/Netflix
One of the ways in which this is done, she wrote, is through the director’s choice to depict “imagined chapters of his heroine’s life with gobsmackingly crass detail.”
These chapters include showing the inside of her vagina as well as an image of Monroe’s unborn child speaking to her, who “begs not to be aborted,” Hornaday explained.
“Monroe might have been damaged, but she was so much more than a trope for the kind of revelatory abasement Dominik dishes out,” she wrote.
Rather than focus on Monroe’s “exquisite comic timing, superb physical grace or shrewdness,” he instead focuses on the horrors she faced in her short life, concluded the critic.
Manohla Dargis ofThe New York Timeswrote that given everything the star went through in her own life, from her time in an orphanage to issues with substance abuse, “it is a relief that she didn’t have to suffer through the vulgarities ofBlonde, the latest necrophiliac entertainment to exploit her.”
Dargis wrote that Dominik’s version of Monroe in the film is “is almost nothing more than a victim.”
She said that in the director’s choice to blur the lines between the films Monroe performed in and her real life, he “ends up reducing Marilyn to the very image — the goddess, the sexpot, the pinup, the commodity — that he also seems to be trying to critique.”
Dargis added, “But if Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.”
The New Yorkerechoed this sentiment, with film critic Richard Brody noting that the director does the very thing that the film is apparently supposed to explore.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free weekly newsletterto get the biggest news of the week delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Netflix
In hisnegative review forThe Los Angeles Times, critic Justin Chang wrote, “Because Dominik can’t conceive of Monroe as anything but a victim, he can’t even grant her the respect of seeing her as, at the very least, a participant in her successandher undoing. A smarter, tougher movie would have explored that participation and recognized it as its own kind of power — a power as undeniable as the allure of the movies themselves.”
She “carries the film squarely on her shoulders,“Deadline’sDamon Wise wrote at the time, describing her performance as “all-in, ferociously emotional but complex in its nuances as it explores the child-like sex symbol’s many paradoxes.”
Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawsonwrotethat the actress is “fiercely, almost scarily committed to the role, maintaining high and focused energy through every torrent of tears and screams and traumas” and crafts a “vivid and frightening picture of the madness of fame.”
Blondeis now streaming on Netflix.
source: people.com
