‘Blonde’ Review: Exploiting Marilyn Monroe for Old Times’ Sake

Given all of the indignities and horrors that Marilyn Monroe endured throughout her 36 years — her household tragedies, paternal absence, maternal abuse, time in an orphanage, time in foster properties, spells of poverty, unworthy movie roles, insults about her intelligence, struggles with psychological sickness, issues with substance abuse, sexual assault, the slavering consideration of insatiable followers — it’s a aid that she didn’t need to undergo by the vulgarities of “Blonde,” the most recent necrophiliac leisure to use her.

Hollywood has at all times eaten its personal, together with its useless. On condition that the trade has additionally at all times cherished making films about its personal equipment, it’s no shock that it additionally likes making films about its victims and martyrs. Three years in the past within the biopic “Judy,” Renée Zellweger performed Judy Garland close to the tip of her troubled life. “Blonde” goes for a extra complete biopic sweep — it runs almost three hours — embracing a bleakly acquainted trajectory that begins with Monroe’s sad childhood, revisits her dazzling but progressively fraught fame, her depressingly abusive relationships, myriad well being points and catastrophic downward spiral.

After a quick prelude that introduces Marilyn on the top of her fame, the film rewinds to the unhappy, lonely little woman named Norma Jeane, with a terrifying, mentally unstable single mom, Gladys (Julianne Nicholson). Childhood is a horror present — Gladys is chilly, violent — however Norma Jeane crawls into maturity (a advantageous if overwhelmed Ana de Armas). She fashions for cheesecake magazines, and earlier than lengthy breaks into the movie trade, which is one other nightmare. Quickly after she steps onto lots, she is raped by a person, right here known as Mr. Z and seemingly primarily based on Darryl F. Zanuck, the longtime head of twentieth Century Fox studio, the place Monroe turned a star.

“Blonde” relies on the 2000 Joyce Carol Oates hefty (the unique hardback is 738 pages) fictionalized account of Monroe’s life. Within the novel, Oates attracts from the historic report however likewise performs with information. She cooks up a ménage a trois for Monroe and channels her ostensible ideas, together with throughout a lurid tryst with an unkind President John F. Kennedy. Within the introduction to the ebook, the critic Elaine Showalter writes that Oates used Monroe as “an emblem of twentieth-century America.” A girl, Showalter later provides with out a lot conviction, “who was way more than a sufferer.”