Venice Review: Ana De Armas As Marilyn Monroe In Andrew Dominik’s ‘Blonde’

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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.Gus Van Sant, at the height of his Béla Tarr period, achieved something remarkable and kind of similar with 2005’s Last Days, an immersive but fictional rumination on the events preceding rock star Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994.

But then, Blonde’s closest antecedents are all in fiction — anyone expecting an idiot’s guide to Marilyn Monroe will be surprised or even appalled to see the late star’s life presented as a horror movie in the surreal, nightmarish style of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, another film about a blonde actress struggling with the boundaries between fantasy and fiction and whose star, Naomi Watts, was attached to this movie way back in the day.‘Blonde’ Venice Film Festival Premiere Photo GalleryIt’s worth noting here that Blonde is not based on any of the Marilyn memoirs that sprang up in the wake of her death after a drug overdose in 1962; its source is Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel Blonde, a thinly veiled but highly fictionalized (and equally controversial) account of Monroe’s life.Many of the criticisms of Oates’ novel will be aimed at Dominik’s film — an unfortunate pitfall of employing irony is that it often looks exactly like the thing it is meant to not be, and in Marilyn’s case this is her dehumanization in the eyes of the studios, the media and the public.

There’s a case that Blonde, both on the page and on the screen, is simply inventing fresh indignities for the most positively, permanently persecuted heroine outside of a John Waters movie ever to have to suffer, but that’s a