A Woman in Trouble
Bizarro film maudit, messy minor masterpiece, or maybe both at once, Andrew Dominik's anti-biopic would if nothing else pass with flying colours David Letterman's "Is This Anything?" test. It is absolutely and unmistakably something, even if, one might reasonably argue, it has only slightly more to do with Norma Jeane Baker née Mortenson than, say, Gus Van Sant's Last Days had to do with Kurt Cobain. The narrative momentum of both films is propelled forward by something like Freud's death drive, though in Blonde the race to the grave is stopped and stalled and sporadically rerouted by weird variations on the pleasure principle and an Electra Complex literalized ad nauseam. While David Lynch's films may be read profitably as grotesque/sublime Francis Bacon-esque reservoirs of Freudian signification, Dominik pushes that symbolism further still, in search of...well, what exactly?
I'm not sure that Dominik is sure any more than the real Norma Jeane was ever very sure of what it was she wanted out of Marilyn Monroe, life, or her various relationships. But she was a fantastic actress, both comic and dramatic (see esp. her thoroughly wrenching work in The Misfits!). She wasn't ever only an iconic pop-cultural cipher. Dominik ungenerously short-changes her in this crucial regard. Thankfully Ana de Armas recognizes Monroe's sparkling performative brilliance and with her wholly embodied Norma Jeane/Marilyn rediviva(e) heroically saves this movie from an abyss of sadistic, misogynistic cruelty to which Lynch's work has also at times veered dangerously and discomfitingly close. Instead, our hearts break again and again for de Armas-as-Norma-Jeane-as-Marilyn –– and not least in the otherwise profoundly stupid JFK scene. Adam Nayman writes that "in terms of sheer, visceral unpleasantness, Blonde has nothing on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me." He may be right about that, but let's hope it doesn't take critics and other discerning viewers quite as long to catch up to the perverse charms and merits of Blonde as it did for Lynch's most misjudged great film to begin to get its due.
