Blonde: An Absolute Nightmare

On September 28th, Netflix released the movie Blonde, a film that disgraced the name Marilyn Monroe and saddened fans of the celebrity.

The film followed the life of Norma Jean, or Marylin Monroe, played by Ana de Armas and Lily Fisher. It shows Marylin’s successes and her many hardships in becoming an actor. The story starts with her childhood with a deranged mother, played by Julianna Nicholson, to her rise as an actor, her complicated love life and her disturbing death at the film’s end.

The film was written and directed by Andrew Dominik, who is also worked on movies like Killing Them Softly and Chopper. Andrew decided to take a different approach with the retelling of Marylin Monroe’s story by progressing the story in small parts instead of through a typical continuous storyline.

About the film itself, I have very few things I found enjoyable in this movie. One of the good points of this movie though was its cast. The actors did a wonderful job portraying realistic and human-like personalities through their characters, making you feel sadness for Marylin or anger towards her mother, Gladys. I also really liked the set design. While some were simplistic, it felt like the set always fit the scene onscreen.

Unfortunately, those are the only two points I found to be good about the film, the rest was an absolute trainwreck. Firstly, I hated the plotline and pacing. The plot was extremely confusing, and you never knew what was happening throughout the film. It would go from scene to scene without context. An example of this that annoyed me the most was when we skipped from Marylin being given up to the orphanage to her adulthood. It went from her being given up, to black, to going to meet her manager as a fully grown adult, the pacing felt nonexistent and like it wasn’t important during the writing of the film. In all honesty, this movie felt like many small scenes shoved together and called a “film.”

Secondly, the writing of the film as well as the characters felt confusing and extremely disrespectful to the characters, especially Marylin. Even though the actors did a nice job with what they were given, I could feel no sympathy or even understand what and why the supporting cast acted in such a cruel manner. Also, the film did not feel like it was talking about Marylin and shoved explicit moments into the film all the time. This writing pushed a narrative that Marylin did not work hard for her fame and only got it because she was pretty. All the men in the movie cared about was her looks, the money they could make off her, or having “fun” with her. All this movie did was disrespect Marylin’s hard work in life and made her life look like it was always depressing.

All in all, this movie should have never been made. This movie, from my perspective, looks like an unjustifiable money grab to make money off a topic done multiple times. I would never recommend this movie to anyone, not even to my worst enemy.