Movie review: ‘Blonde’ isn’t really about Marilyn Monroe. It’s about making her suffer
There’s at least one moment in “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s dazzling, depressing and fatally incurious movie about Marilyn Monroe, when you might not be sure if you’re watching Ana de Armas or the genuine article. Watching this lustrous black-and-white sequence, set during the production of “Some Like It Hot” (1959), I was briefly certain that was the real Monroe boop-boop-be-dooping her way through “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” so evocatively does De Armas narrow her gaze (her eyes are the big giveaway) and drink in the milky adoration of the spotlight. Only the absence of that teasing shadow on her dress, the one that mimics a rising and falling neckline, gives the game away.
Even in these times of Oscar-grubbing biopic overload, a moment like that has to count as some kind of achievement. It takes more than crimson lips, swiveling hips and a platinum dye job to incarnate this most enduring of 20th-century movie stars, even if Monroe was reduced to her physical attributes for too much of her short life and extraordinary career. People insisted she couldn’t act; studios typecast her as a dumb blond, a setback she partly overcame through sly wit and
