Blonde (Andrew Dominick, 2022)

Bombshell

Andrew Dominik's Blonde is a horror film that fails not because it's so sadistic but because it's not sadistic enough. 

This is no bio of the famous actress' life; the filmmakers have insisted that it's an adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel, which Oates in turn insists is fiction not biography. If the film reflects anything it reflects (through the novel) the darkness and violence that fills Oates' own life and fiction-- along with power, poverty, class tensions, sexual abuse, often visited on characters based on real-life figures. 

Haven't read the book, can only talk about the film. There are reports that the film is faithful to the book-- if anything, softens some of the book's more extreme tendencies, such as the protagonist addressing various men as 'daddy' some 170 times. 

The film has been condemned for focusing almost exclusively on the heroine as victim; worse, on playing up the most awful rumors about the actress' life as if they were true (there's no real evidence for one that the mother tried to drown her daughter, that the protagonist ever had an abortion (there's even doubt she could carry a pregnancy to term), that she ever had an affair (or anything more than a one-night stand) with an equally legendary president)-- though if we're to treat this more as fiction than biography I suppose anything goes. One might ask why Oates would write such a novel in the first place and the only answer I can come up with is that she's so disgusted with the victimization of women over the years she dredged up every rumor no matter how outrageous or flimsily evidenced about the woman's well-documented well-discussed life and crammed it into a single volume, see how we feel about it.

I'm reminded of another attempt at rewriting history-- Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood-- but see two differences: 1) Tarantino tries to appeal to cinephiles by serving them a heaping plateful of violence as righteous indignation, prettily garnished with a touch of fantasy just the way we want it (Sharon Tate still alive, the Manson family deservedly punished); Dominik taking his cue from Oates presents a life in as ugly a manner as possible with no apology whatsoever and we reject his (and her) vision saying no no this is not her, this is not the way we want to see her, remember her (Dominik all the while using recreations of her most famous images in magazines and films as if to insist yes this is exactly how you've seen her, seamlessly melding memories with his own footage and adding yes this is exactly how you're seeing her). 

2) Dominik unlike Tarantino is a talented filmmaker, and delivers his three-hour epic with genuine visual force. There's something unnerving about the way Dominik uses imagery to create an impressionist portrait; life melts into memory melts into dream melts into nightmare with little warning beyond a shift from color to black-and-white, a shift in aspect ratio. In one bravura sequence the actress sits in a passenger plane in drug-induced haze, stands up to a sea of applause (Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 much?) vomits into a toilet (the camera assuming the toilet's uptilted point of view) returns to her seat past the same applauding crowd. In another she wakes up in the dark, the camera fixing on her pale face and hair as she walks wraithlike through her home a la Polanski's Repulsion; later she's abducted (the second of two times) and wheeled into surgery in a scene straight out of John Frankenheimer's Seconds.

That's not the film's most horrific moment tho. Top spot in my book's one of the simplest: our heroine staring openmouthed and saucereyed at a phone ringing in a chest drawer. Or is that a baby crying?

Which isn't the film's key moment either, I think. That would be the scene where our heroine's makeup man works on her while she sobs: "Please come don't abandon me" "She's coming"-- looks into the mirror and yes she's there, the movie star is there, tearstained face turned million watt smile. A finer Jekyll-and-Hyde moment I'm not likely to find in a recent film.

Might take this moment to note that Dominik not just borrows from Fellini or Polanski or Frankenheimer but Lynch, but not from more obvious titles like Lost Highway or Fire Walk With Me but from The Elephant Man: the camera assuming the protagonist's point of view as he/she sees long-missed beloved parent, then turns away to fly into a field of stars.  

I do think much of the criticism has a point. Dominik's adaptation of Oates' novel is a one-sided myopic view of a complex life, and the one-sidedness brings out an unforgivable flaw: it lets the audience off the hook. By being so tunnelvisioned the film doesn't bring down one of the most powerful celebrities in Hollywood-- able to conjure an immortal figure of fantasy and desire out of the everyday elements of an average woman (a brunette at that)-- instead brings down a mere scandal-sheet starlet, weak and neurotic and hooked on drugs, already half-suicidal. There's a reason Shakespeare often chose lords and kings as protagonists (in part to appeal to wealthier patrons)-- sorry, a reason Shakespeare begins his tragedies with men in positions of authority, wielding their power, showing their nobility of soul: he knew that one must build one's hero (or heroine) up before casting him down; otherwise the fall isn't all that impressive. The actress' production company, her political activism, her taste for theater work and undoubted talent for comedy were all chances to build her up; director and writer ignore all that, ignore the opportunity to craft real tragedy out of a sordid fantasy.

Despite which Dominik through sheer force of filmmaking does eke out a poignant moment here there: late in the film when our protagonist receives a special delivery she has to run about the house in a bathrobe looking for change to tip the boy; when she does find a dollar bill she holds it high up in the air like a flag of victory. The brief sequence, in lyrical handheld with a light helping of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' otherworldly music, stayed with me long after the credit sequence rolled-- will stay with me long after, I suspect.

I will say this: that moment when the actress walks off the set of Billy Wilder's comedy Some Like It Hot shrieking that the joke's on her-- totally agree. Wilder's movie is funny, mostly for Jack Lemmon's trans gaiety and Tony Curtis' deft underplaying, but her Sugar Kane Kowalczyk plays into every cliche she fought to free herself from; much prefer Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who wields her dumb blonde persona like a rapier, the better to skewer the poor sweet helpless men surrounding her.  As for Dominik's film-- maybe not the best of the year but possibly the most harrowing horror to come out this October, warts and ambitions and all.