Tag Archives: Marilyn Monroe

Blonde

24 Sep

Ana de Armas is all-in as Marilyn

By Tom Meek Thursday, September 22, 2022

Andrew Dominik’s new spin on the legacy of Marilyn Monroe is a lurid layer cake of sex and spectacle, with occasional intimate segues into a vulnerable soul screaming for love and a safe space. “Blonde” is also a downright riveting flick from frame one until the credits roll; just how much of it is true is another issue. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ mega-paged tome, which is admittedly fictionalized, there’s threesomes, sexual assault, on-set meltdowns, daddy issues, delusions, emotional juicing and more – enough to earn the film an NC-17 rating. If you take anything from the film, it’s that Monroe, for all her accomplishments and fame, led a pretty shitty life from start to finish, thanks mostly to men who wanted to control her, own her and consume her.

There are a few reasons for the film’s engrossing success, even though it feels so opportunistic and exploitative that you want it to fail. First are the stylistic choices by Dominik, such as cutting in and out of black and white, impressive recreation of screens from Monroe classics such as “Some Like it Hot” and “Niagara,” and the hard Marilyn POV that pays off – kind of – when she’s with JFK and pumped up on sedatives by a doctor ever slinking around the edges of the set. There’s also an emotive score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and, of course and most of all, Ana de Armas, who conjures Monroe effortlessly: her breathy, hazy intones and the toggle between perfect shiny object before the camera and hot troubled mess otherwise. 

The young Norma Jeane (Lily Fisher) as painted has daddy issues – namely that she doesn’t have one, and it becomes an affliction that eats at her over time. Later in life Marilyn refers to her husbands in wispy coos as “daddy.” It’s heavy-handed but fits right in, as men and possible father figures loom large, for the most part with unpleasant results. An early first interview at a studio with a Mr. Z (Zanuck?) comes with requisite (bent-over-the) desk sex, whether wanted or not. Then there’s the hubbies, Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale), protective and sensitive until he gets fed up with Marilyn’s sex-bomb image and becomes abusive and worse, and playwright Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), in touch with Marilyn’s inner demons but inert when it comes to helping. The real kicker is JFK (Caspar Phillipson), lounging on a bed in hotel room, shirtless but in his infamous back brace, on the phone conducting presidential business. When Marilyn enters, passed on by an agent keeping watch at the suite’s open door, he gives her a series of gestures imploring oral service – the door remains open and Dominik (“Killing Them Softly,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ”) invites us to join in, dropping the camera right into the middle of the act. There’s no full frontal, but the experience is overwhelmingly visceral. Given all that came before, it’s just another indignity in the life of Ms. Monroe. The time Marilyn does find true comfort in the men’s arms, it’s an ongoing, imagined three-way romance with Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams), racily rendered but also one of the movie’s more piquant and liberating tear-aways.

This isn’t the first time the inner turmoil of Marilyn has deconstructed and rewritten the script for Hollywood’s most iconic starlet. Back in 2011 Michelle Williams played Monroe at odds with Laurence Olivier on the set of “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957) in Simon Curtis’ “My Week with Marilyn.” Much here is asked of Armas, who is topless almost as much as she’s not. As Ryan Gosling’s virtual love interest Joi in “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), she demonstrated the sensuality gene that was such an ingrained part of Monroe’s public persona. She notched comedic flair in “Knives Out” (2019), lively action chops in the recent Bond blast “No Time to Die” (2021) and, maybe more to the end of the Monroe role, played an emotionally and sexually complex wife in Adrien Lyne’s twisted erotic thriller “Deep Water” this year. 

Like Oates’ book, “Blonde” is long, nearly three hours, but it ticks by in a sprightly way due mostly to the manic nature of Monroe’s depicted private life, brought to crescendos and crashes by Armas’ all-in effort. The cinematography by Chayse Irvin (“BlacKkKlansman”) is another staunch asset, as is Julianne Nicholson’s turn as Marilyn’s unstable single mother. It’s an undeniably well crafted film that rescripts history and delivers revelation under the guise of verisimilitude. The question is, does it really do its subject justice?

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The Complete Howard Hawks

15 Jun

‘Complete Howard Hawks’ at Film Archive celebrates director who could do anything

By Tom Meek 
John Wayne and Angie Dickinson talk with Howard Hawks on the set of “Rio Bravo” in 1959.

Howard Hawks may be the greatest American filmmaker you never really think about. His name should be right up there in the conversation with Coppola, Chaplin, Scorsese, Tarantino, Ford and Welles, but rarely is. His output – dozens of films, most during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s Golden Era of Hollywood – is an astounding list, filled with iconic stars, yet Hawks never won an Oscar and was nominated only once as director, for “Sergeant York” (1941). Beginning Friday, the Harvard Film Archive will commemorate Hawks’ incredible career with “The Complete Howard Hawks.” The slate of 40 films will be exhibited throughout the summer, concluding Aug. 30 with “Monkey Business” (1952).

The classics include “Red River” (1948, screening Aug. 4 and 11), “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953, June 15 and 23), “Bringing Up Baby” (1938, June 15-16) and “The Big Sleep” (1946, June 29-30), peppered with Hollywood A-listers such as James Cagney, Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and even a young James Caan. “Sergeant York” screens Aug. 12.

Hawks had a pretty rich life. He grew up in a family that possessed a small industrial fortune, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell. His interest in film came when his family transplanted from the Midwest to Pasadena, California. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force during World War I and some dabbling as a gambler and race car driver, Hawks fell in with the likes of Cecil B. DeMille and Douglas Fairbanks. Hawks made several silent films in the 1920s, including the hedonistic “A Girl in Every Port” (1928, July 8), the Arabian-Parisian romance “Fazil” (1928, July 22) – both to be screened with a live accompaniment by Robert Humphreville – and his debut about a woman coming to terms with her sudden blindness, “The Road to Glory” (1926, not on the calendar and not to be confused with the 1936 war movie of the same title by Hawks that plays Aug. 16).

Many of Hawks’ works mirrored his life. He made several war films with a focus on aviation, including “Today We Live” (1933, Aug. 24), “Only Angels Have Wings” (1939, June 14 and 16), “Dawn Patrol” (1930, July 13 and 28) and the chaotic post-Pearl Harbor bombing epic, “Air Force” (1943, July 14 and 21), as well car racing dramas such as “The Crowd Roars” (1932, Aug. 19) starring Cagney and “Red Line 7000” (1965, Aug. 23).

Hawks’ diverse, genre-spanning slate included crime dramas (“Scarface,” 1932, June 29 and July 7), noir (“The Big Sleep”), romantic comedies (“His Girl Friday,” 1940, June 24 and Aug. 30), westerns (“Rio Bravo,” 1959, July 26 and Aug. 10) where he was often competing for audience share against friend John Ford, and a foray into science fiction (“The Thing From Another World,” 1951, July 13 and 21, from the same source material as John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror film “The Thing”). 

Personal favorites include the adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s pulp noir “The Big Sleep” which boasts a screenwriting credit from Willam Faulkner, “Bringing Up Baby,” which I feel is the greatest rom-com of all time – but, then again, I wanted to be a paleontologist growing up – and “Scarface,” with Paul Muni setting the standard for classic bad guy performances. Then there’s the classic showdown “High Noon,” which paired Gary Cooper (one of Hawks’ two longtime collaborators, the other being Cary Grant) as the sheriff with an “X” on his back and Grace Kelly, and the grim and dark “Rio Bravo,” which would become the basis for another Carpenter film, the 1976 urban crime thriller, “Assault on Precinct 13.” Angling back toward the light is the newsroom romp “His Girl Friday.” Perhaps one reason Hawks is left out when it comes to talking greats is his appetite for a smorgasbord of subjects and his quietly competent compositions – for better or worse, you don’t feel the filmmaker in there trying to make a splash or leave his signature, as you do with many star directors. Hawks’ films have always been about narrative and character and letting the combination make the magic that pulls in the audience. It’s something he did repeatedly. 

“The Complete” series at the HFA was the brainchild of programmer David Pendleton, who sadly passed in 2017. Previous series have focused on Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. 

Films and times, tickets and other information are on the HFA website.

 

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