Netflix’s new Marilyn Monroe movie that hopes to be a major contender during awards season.Running time: 166 minutes. Rated NC-17 (some sexual content).
Out Sept. 16 in New York. On Netflix Sept. 28.Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ controversial 2000 fiction book about the actress who died in 1962 at age 36 — many shocking events here come courtesy of the author’s tawdry imagination — the film is a fabulist’s tale of cruelty, objectification, pain and control.It’s too much. “My Week With Marilyn,” starring Michelle Williams in the part, has its traumas for sure, but that movie is “Some Like It Hot” next to this journey to the depths of despair.Director Andrew Dominik, with great flair, paints Monroe’s tragic life in brushstrokes of grief, close to what Pablo Larraín did with Jackie Kennedy in “Jackie” and Princess Diana in “Spencer.” However, while those at times indulgent, nonliteral movies had a grand emotional sweep that probed the women’s psyches, this one feels hollow and left me cold, despite the visual splendor and a committed turn from Ana de Armas as Marilyn.“Blonde” amounts to one brutally horrible moment after another — many of which might not have actually happened.
Knowing she’d written a novel and not a real biography, obfuscating Oates didn’t even use the figures’ real names. The film follows suit.Marilyn is handed off to a conveyor belt of awful men, most of whom she breathily calls “daddy” to infantilize herself and create a father figure she never had.
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