However, only a handful of filmmakers have succeeded to make nudity appear artistic than vulgar. "It's the pictures that got small." Poor Norma's delusional, sure, but on this matter she might also be right.Nudity is arguably one of the best selling points of the films. "You used to be big," the house guest says on recognising his host, one-time silent film star Norma Desmond. Perhaps the definitive Tinseltown take-down is Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's scathing 1950 noir. Meanwhile, Hollywood history is riddled with variations on this theme, from the Lynch films right back to the story of aspiring actress Peg Entwistle, whose fatal leap from the 'H' of the old Hollywoodland sign in 1932 quickly became a cautionary classic: the movie colony destroys stars and wannabes alike. So relentlessly punishing is this telling of the Monroe myth, it's as if Dominik thinks he's the first to notice that beneath the glitz and glamour, there's something rotten in the state of show business. What's left is a victim who'll readily give herself over to any guy who responds to "daddy". Never mind that Monroe was famed for her intoxicating screen magnetism and sneaky "dumb blonde" wit, this woman can only experience "Marilyn" and her talents as the helpless host of a hostile alien parasite.ĭominik, by contrast, shrinks Monroe (she who was praised as an American monument on the scale of Niagara Falls!) right down to convenient laptop-size and strips the version crafted by Oates of almost all agency, scrapping her quips and philosophical inner monologue. That Norma Jeane spends a sizeable chunk of her time at home in nothing but white bloomers only strengthens the impression that Blonde takes an infantilising view of its subject. (Take a shot for every time she says it and you too will die an early death.) Of her limited vocabulary, the word in heaviest rotation is "daddy". Words trip out of her haltingly, as if she's so subsumed by abuse that she barely has the faculty of language. In the bedroom as on the sound stage, Norma Jeane appears constantly on the verge of tears, her big, beautiful eyes welling with emotion and widened with some stressful mixture of fear and wonder. None of these men occupy the spotlight for long, however. Monroe's real-life hubbies Joe DiMaggio (billed as the "ex-athlete") and Arthur Miller ("the playwright") are played by Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody, while Cass Chaplin Jr and Eddy Robinson Jr (feckless sons of Hollywood royalty, both), whom Oates envisioned as forming a throuple with the ingenue, are played by Xavier Samuel and Evan Williams. The film is mired in heavy-handed impressionism its myriad aspect ratio changes and pivots between colour and black-and-white feel like fussy flourishes, and fail to elevate the cavalcade of traumas depicted above the kind of exploitation the film nominally exists to condemn.įor what quite possibly could add up to hours, the camera lingers insistently on de Armas's face as she weathers backhanded compliments, insults and assaults from both slimy industry folk and lovers. There's the increasingly hallucinogenic storytelling style, evoking its leading lady's descent into madness and addiction, the strangely stilted dialogue, and a score (by Dominik regulars Nick Cave and Warren Ellis) that cribs freely from Angelo Badalamenti (distractingly so in one climactic sequence, set to a dead ringer for the Twin Peaks theme song).ĭominik doesn't possess Lynch's masterful control of tone, however. Her body was found in bed at her recently purchased Brentwood, Los Angeles home in the small hours of August 5, 1962, phone in hand and a riot of pill bottles crowding the night-stand.īlonde hews closer to the provocations of the incorrigible Gaspar Noé, but Lynch is the most obvious touchstone. The growing chasm between these two selves – public-facing and private – could only resolve in tragedy whether by an intentional or accidental act of self-destruction, Monroe was dead at 36. Back in 2010, it was announced that Naomi Watts would star as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates's sprawling, fictionalised biography of the same name, to be written and directed by Australian Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford This Much I Know to Be True).įolding in the icon's family history of mental illness and a childhood marred by neglect and abuse, Oates constructed her protagonist as a woman divided: the sunny, sexed-up persona Marilyn Monroe, screen goddess, versus Norma Jeane Mortensen (aka Norma Jeane Baker), the shy, stuttering girl next door, fatherless and all but abandoned by a mother who would spend most of her daughter's life in a psychiatric institution.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |