The first reviews for the upcoming film Blonde are in, and they're largely positive. Blonde is the latest project to dramatize the life of the iconic screen actress Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, who appeared in more than 30 movies and is still one of the most recognizable figures in cinema to this day. Although many of her films are iconic, including the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy Some Like It Hot and the 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which she performs the iconic number "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend," she is perhaps most notorious for her personal life, which includes high-profile marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller as well as an alleged affair with President John F. Kennedy before her death from a drug overdose at the age of 36.
Blonde, which drops on Netflix on September 28, will focus on all those sordid details of Monroe's life, as fictionalized in its source material: Joyce Carol Oates' 2000 novel of the same name. With The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford director Andrew Dominik at the helm, it promises to be a saucy and graphic exploration of her life, making it the first streaming exclusive film to ever receive an NC-17 rating. The film stars de Armas as Monroe, with an ensemble cast that includes Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, Bobby Cannavale as Joe DiMaggio, Xavier Samuel as Charles Chaplin Jr., Julianne Nicholson as Monroe's mother Gladys Pearl Baker, and Jackie star Caspar Phillipson once again playing John F. Kennedy.
Today, the embargo has lifted on reviews ahead of Blonde's limited theatrical release on September 16, and critics have shared their full thoughts on the hotly anticipated film. Generally, the praise has been positive, giving kudos to de Armas' committed performance as the iconic actress. However, critics are more split on the movie around her, with a few finding the gauzy, gritty approach to her story a little too grim. Check out quotes from selected critics below:
Bilge Ebiri, Vulture:
Those looking for a biopic about Marilyn Monroe are sure to be disappointed, confused, and/or outraged, which may explain why Netflix has been so cautious about anybody seeing it up until its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Regardless, the picture will surely fuel endless rounds of soul-pulverizing debates. In fact, it’s kind of designed to, loaded as it is with provocations.
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian:
his is a portrait of Monroe that accentuates her suffering and anguish, canonising her into a feminist saint who died for our scopophilic sins, that we might feast on her beauty and talent. Maybe it’s not an opera but a kind of religious ritual for the modern age.
Owen Gleiberman, Variety:
A good biopic invites the audience to experience, from the inside out, who the subject really was. That’s the level that “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s film about Marilyn Monroe, operates on for most of its 2 hours and 46 minutes...The movie is a hushed and floating psychodramatic klieg-light fantasia, shot in color and black-and-white, that presents a fusion of reality and fiction.
Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire:
Star Ana de Armas’ uncanny resemblance to Marilyn takes the film a long way. If Dominik had thought as much about actually interpreting his character opposed to resurrecting her physically, “Blonde” could have a tour de force.
Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair:
Blonde is boldly and complexly mounted, but that technique—so brazenly applied by Dominik—could actually be in service of something far simpler, and more base. Blonde is a film partly about exploitation that might be exploitative itself. If the film is aware of that meta function, then there’s something interesting happening in it. If not, and Dominik thinks he is genuinely ennobling Monroe and expressing some kind of radical pity for her, then Blonde is a little perverse.
David Rooney, THR:
You might feel like you need a shower after Blonde, but hey, at least it’s not bland. In his first narrative feature in 10 years, Andrew Dominik brings intoxicating visual style and a voyeuristic leer to Joyce Carol Oates’ 700-plus page biographical fiction novel of the same name.
Damon Wise, Deadline:
Forget Seberg, forget Mank, forget Judy — Andrew Dominik’s Venice Film Festival competition entry Blonde takes a blowtorch to the entire concept of the Hollywood biopic and arrives at something almost without precedent.
So far, it's too early for Blonde to have an official score on the review aggregator service Rotten Tomatoes. However, given the way that the tide has been moving in favor of the film, it's entirely likely it will be Fresh, with a huge margin of error, though it remains to be seen if it will eventually be Certified Fresh. It will likely land somewhere in between the scores for the 2012 biopic My Week with Marilyn (83%), which starred four-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams in the title role, and the 1991 TV movie Norma Jean and Marilyn (60%), which starred Ashley Judd as Norma Jean and Mira Sorvino as Marilyn Monroe, showing two different sides of the iconic figure.
With such intrigue swirling around the graphic nature of its content, this generally positive reaction to Blonde is just one more feather in its cap. While an NC-17 rating inherently limits a film's demographic, the idea of Monroe being paired with such a salacious presentation has certainly piqued the interest of many. With the reviews being largely positive, quite a few others who were on the fence will likely take the plunge once the movie drops.
Source: Various (see above)
