Netflix
Filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, a new Netflix film about the trials and tribulations of screen icon Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas), has little fidelity to historical fact. Rather, it’s a tapestry of scenes meant to convey the actress’s loneliness, isolation, and trauma.
“I can identify with the Jews. Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me,” Marilyn once confided to her friend Susan Strasberg after converting to Judaism.
From early moments depicting her mentally ill mother attempting to drown a young Norma Jeane in the bathtub to her cursed entrée into Hollywood, consisting of studio exec Darryl F. Zanuck raping her over a desk during an audition, to Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale, quite the glow-up) belting Marilyn over her flying-skirt scene in The Seven Year Itch, Dominik’s isn’t a traditional biopic but a surrealist symphony of victimization.