But there are too many scenes in which she’s asked only to shrivel and shriek and bleed and vomit as she’s dragged and batted between set pieces, and so the image audiences are left with is one of Monroe as little more than a doll. De Armas does the best she can to embody a real human being in Blonde’s more introspective moments: When given the opportunity, she soars within the film’s spellbinding cinematography and uncanny replications of real-life Monroe photographs. But to deny Monroe most, if not all, of her joy, her wit, her strength-not to mention the scraps of autonomy she wrested out of a white-knuckled industry-is an offense to Monroe and to the woman playing her. The Gentlemen Prefer Blondes star’s story is uniquely, oppressively sad-many of the most widely recognized portions of her biography are painful-and to ignore this in a film would be similarly negligent. True, to deny that Monroe was a tragic figure would be to conjure another fiction. Blonde’s status as fiction, by that measure, necessitates wild deviations and omissions from Monroe’s real life: The film includes multiple graphic scenes of rape, abortion, and oral sex CGI close-ups of a talking fetus and a cervix pulled open via speculum the gurgling sounds of a young girl nearly drowned in a bathtub and the inclusion of the words “baby,” “daddy,” and “slut” in claustrophobic proximity. Instead it evokes the shroud of a tall tale, in order to justify whatever choices Dominik deemed appropriate for a singular interpretation of a singular star. The film, based on a very-much-fictional novel by Joyce Carol Oates, does not purport to be a biopic. This is where the defense of Blonde as a “fictionalization” of Monroe’s life falls apart. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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