“Niagara and Marilyn Monroe… The Two Most Electrifying Sights in the World!” That was the logline for Monroe's film Niagara, plastered across the 50s cinema screen in that famous title card lettering. She was the poster girl for classical Hollywood, the sex symbol, defined by her voice, looks, sexuality, and curly blonde bob. The cultural icon with the self-fashioned name, and the high-profile relationships, dazzled in the spotlight and stunned on the silver screen. To the public, the Hollywood executives, and the outside world, she was Marilyn Monroe. Unflinching and avant-garde in front of the camera, vulnerable, troubled, and misunderstood off it.

In Andrew Dominik’s postmortem examination of Monroe’s life in Netflix’s new release Blonde, we are exposed to her perturbed existence. The film is not just a portrayal of the “behind-the-scenes” life of the actor, but a bifurcation that separates the facade of Marilyn Monroe from the anxious, insecure reality of Norma Jean. Blonde is a gothic, atmospheric exploration of a flawed superstar with a tortured spirit.

Movies are about taste, and are subject to subjectivity. The medieval poet John Lydgate supposedly exclaimed that you can “please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” Very rarely is there a unified judgment of a film, and with Dominik’s Blonde proving to be such a divisive flick among critics, what is it about one of Netflix’s most highly-anticipated movies in recent times that has divided so many?

Ana de Armas is Praised in Blonde

Blonde star Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe
Netflix

As one of the most highly-sought after actors of the last decade, the hopes around Ana de Armas’ portrayal of the blonde bombshell were naturally lofty. Her performance emphatically warranted the praise she has received, and it seems to be the film’s only real attribute critics can agree on. Armas’ portrait of a generational emblem achieves a sensational feat in terms of her likeness both in image and in character. Her resemblance is startling, from the bottomless chasms of her eyes as she permanently appears to be on the verge of tears to the symbolic beauty spot, red lipstick, curvaceous figure, and of course, the blonde hair-do; she is very much Monroe’s physical reincarnation.

Related: Marilyn Monroe: The Best Actors' Portrayals of the Blonde

Yet, perhaps what’s more impressive is Ana de Armas’ ability to mold herself into the diamond-shoed, sequin-dressed Hollywood sweetheart. She moves with complete grace, and speaks with the softest, whispery, falsetto of a voice, as though she finds herself perennially stuck in a library, though, some criticism has been directed at the Cuban undertones of her attempt at a Californian accent.

She wrings every morsel of pain, unease, and torment out of Monroe, conveying this confusing, torturous cocktail of emotion, from a childhood decimated by a lack of love, and from an excess of neglect. The Knives Out star successfully encompasses all of these characteristics and marries them together to create this explosion of a woman lost in a man’s world. It’s almost irrefutable that de Armas is wonderfully spellbinding as Monroe, even if it is the case that the character she is playing has fallen victim to a sadistic twisting of truth.

Blonde is Not Praised For Its Portrayal of Marilyn Monroe

Blonde movie on Netflix
Netflix 

Blonde, based on the 700-page novel by Joyce Carol Oates, acts more like a grandiose exposé than a biographical illustration. Issue has been majorly taken with the brutalist and sadistic nature of the movie, and how Marilyn Monroe’s mind and body have undeniably been unfairly laid bare. What plays out before us is this bizarre contradiction. In Dominik’s efforts to humanize and embellish this cultural figure through displaying her experiences of great trauma and the comprehension of her lacerated past, he in fact further dehumanizes the goddess of cinema in ways that she frequently fell victim to throughout her subjection of the misogynistic male gaze.

Related: How Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn Represented Two Types of Femininity to Hollywood

There is this persistent fixation on her reliance on and approval of men, with a ceaseless presence of “daddy issues” and her insistence on calling her lovers “daddy.” Like with so many films of a biographical nature, there’s certainly a large degree of gap-filling between the major life events we all know to be true. However, it’s the moments away from the prying public eye, away from the lenses, that are the most poignant and meaningful in truly revealing the actual character of the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes actor.

A scene from Blonde
Netflix

Instead, we are given an excruciating internal examination both figuratively and literally (including several POV close-ups of the insides of her vagina during an abortion), and a flagrant psychological diagnosis throughout the three-hour runtime, and we never really learn anything new about a figure known by everyone, but understood by few.

Ultimately, Blonde is a complex, and at times, flawed display of a woman adored and revered by so many, that seems to trim the positive femininity away from a pioneer in liberating women from archaic cultural expectations. It's totally understandable that the performance has been praised, but the movie hasn't. Ultimately, this is really a portrait of Norma Jean, not Marilyn Monroe, a painful movie about Norma's trials and tribulations. As she says so concisely in the film, “Some of them love Marilyn, some of them hate Marilyn… what’s that got to do with me?"