Blonde has a riveting central performance from Ana de Armas, but reviews of the movie as a whole have been incredibly mixed. Andrew Dominik is an esteemed filmmaker known for his crime dramas Chopper, which launched the career of Eric Bana, and the Palme d'Or contender Killing Them Softly, as well as the highly acclaimed Western The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. However, despite a 14-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, his movie Blonde has received divisive reviews from critics.
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Blonde is a fictionalized take on the life and career of Norma Jeane Mortensen, known to the world as Marilyn Monroe, rather than a traditional biopic. Based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, Andrew Dominik's Blonde is controversially rated NC-17, due to its depiction of "some sexual content." After the release of its trailer, Blonde further became the subject of criticism due to a consensus that Ana de Armas's accent did not match that of Monroe's. However, since critics have had the chance to see Blonde in full, de Armas's performance has become the most acclaimed aspect of the movie.
Why Critics Praise Ana De Armas' Marilyn Monroe Performance So Much
Critics have heavily praised Ana de Armas's performance in Blonde due to the actress's ability to evoke Marilyn Monroe so well, especially in moments in the movie when the Hollywood icon's films are painstakingly recreated. While Ana de Armas does not offer an exact recreation of Marilyn Monroe's voice due to traces of her own accent still being recognizable, critics agree that her evocations of Marilyn Monroe fit perfectly with the rest of Blonde's unconventional approach to telling the story of a real-life figure. More importantly, de Armas seems to truly capture the spirit of Norma Jeane/Marilyn. Here are some critics praising Ana de Armas's performance in Blonde:
The Observer
"Ana de Armas, who proved a scene-stealing presence in films such as Knives Out and No Time to Die, is simply extraordinary as Norma Jeane Baker, an aspiring performer for whom the spectre of Marilyn Monroe is an assumed identity – a portal to stardom."
The Telegraph
"But de Armas captures the tension between Monroe’s flawless surface and fragmenting inner self with extraordinary psychological precision and real depth of feeling. Not only does she look the part, she understands that the part is a dismantling of the look."
Toronto Star
"Expressing all these emotions and experiences demands a lot of actor de Armas, who rises to the challenge superbly."
The Guardian
"A showstopping central performance by Cuban-Spanish actor Ana de Armas, who eerily incarnates the legendary star with a weird little hint of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby."
AP News
"De Armas digs so deep to play Marilyn, she could be speaking ancient Greek and it wouldn’t affect the emotional truth she finds here."
What Critics Dislike About Blonde & Why It's Divisive
The rest of Blonde has been incredibly divisive to many movie critics. Some suggest that Blonde is a truly horrific tragedy, while others find it to be an overly long movie that spends much of its runtime indulging itself in Marilyn Monroe's misery. Blonde is a truly divisive movie with, at the time of writing, nearly as many negative reviews as positive ones: Blonde has a 51% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average critic rating of 5.9/10. Here are some samples of what critics who dislike Blonde are saying:
USA Today
"Although there are insightful moments and surreal bits that pop, it’s overall a bizarre – and at nearly three hours, bloated – film that attempts to honor its subject and instead lets her down."
NPR
"Blonde feels like a slow-motion death march: It's The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe by Basically Everyone She Ever Met."
Metro
"Some of the recreation scenes are uncanny. If only she wasn’t required to spend so much of this movie either sobbing or naked or both."
Chicago Tribune
"Practically every scene works toward the same goal, to the same lugubrious, narcoticized rhythm. Marilyn, defending herself against a proven or potential exploiter or abuser."
Slate
"It’s an astonishing feat of performance that, sadly, feels set adrift in a hollow and dramatically inert movie that disserves both the actor and the character she plays."
In reviews, Blonde's tone is often compared to that of a horror movie; a word almost all of them share when describing the mood of the adaptation is "nightmare." Some critics find that Blonde's horror-adjacent imagery works, while others suggest that a lot of it is simply there for shock value. For a movie that's clearly about exploitation and how much suffering Norma Jeane endured as Marilyn Monroe, many critics feel that Blonde sprints across the line into becoming exploitative itself. The levels of suffering that Blonde depicts Norma Jeane going through is simply too much for many critics, and paired with a nearly three-hour runtime, this makes for a repetitively miserable experience.