It seems to be the season of biopics in film from Elvis to Marilyn Monroe. Often, biopics are approached with a respect and care that the deceased object of film deserves. I think fondly of Bohemian Rhapsody which did Freddie Mercury and Queen such justice and as a fan of the band, it was touching to watch a film that honored his legacy and told his story in all its ups and downs. However, the most recent movie to “honor” a famous person has fallen more than a little short.
“Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s interpretation of the life of icon Marilyn Monroe was everything the reviews said: teetering between commenting on exploitation and contributing to it, beautiful looking but hard to watch, and taking the voice away from the woman. The film attempts to tell Marilyn’s story but it’s almost like it doesn’t even understand the subject it claims to be about. It portrays Monroe as a vapid, depressed starlet attempting to fill her life with various men to cover the hole her absentee father left. A good biopic walks the fine line of the subject’s highs and lows, but Blonde seems to just include the lows. It portrays her entire life as a tragedy and her constantly in the position of the victim. She is constantly taken advantage of by the men in her life in graphic assault scenes that stretch the truth extremely thin. Rather than focus on her flourishing film career, it takes multiple graphic barbs at her love life, reducing her entire career to a string of relationships.
One may wonder how Dominik was able to mess up a movie about someone whose entire career is on tape. Dominik has claimed to never watch any of Marilyn Monroe’s movies, calling her filmography “films about well dressed whores.” He views this film as him rescuing her image which is an oddly sexist outlook. While biopics used to tell stories about the lives of influential individuals, they are now simply cheap shots for kitschy filmmakers to write their own fantasies about individuals that were so much more than what they are portrayed to be. Marilyn Monroe has been constantly abused and sexualized long after her death and her biopic is yet another cheap shot at her legacy posing as a biopic.