Dan Surette

‘Blonde’ is the image of Marilyn Monroe as viewed by someone who discovers from a very young age that one’s life paths are manipulated by the weaknesses of others. Searching for an absent father depicted here by a framed portrait, the very young Norma Jean is driven through the many hells of Hollywood by her distant mother whose alcoholic and suicidal traits consume Norma Jean. While the cliche of a lost father figure can muddle a film it’s kept in check here at least at the beginning of the film. She struggles to keep separate her intellectual insightful life from the male idealized blonde Marilyn. As Marilyn she suffers the wordless ‘casting couch’ humiliation of men in positions of power. Diminished by them she is mocked for dropping Dostoyevsky’s name during a casting call. She is derided by men whose only interest in her is visual and hormonal. These men are locked into their own lives by the created world in which they find themselves, be it sports, politics or the arts. There’s a keening depiction of entitlement portrayed here in the sons of movie mavericks, Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson whereby using Marilyn physically or by association, their positions, whatever that may be, can stay intact. The film is careful to depict the important men in Marilyn’s life as the characters they portrayed in life and not actually be them. Joe DiMaggio is a ‘hero’ and Arthur Miller is a ‘poet’. John Kennedy is seen as a shadowy prone and pathetic character unable to remove himself from his own bed in order to separate his political work from his private one. At just under three hours long there’s little to complain about especially in the look of’Blonde’ but I did squirm a little bit when Marilyn refers to her men as ‘Daddy’ making the original intentions of looking for a lost father figure less of a cliche but in the telling of this story become one.