March | 2023 | filmvetter

Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one of the best films of the last 25 years and would rank in my own top 25 of all time. So, no matter the negative notices, any of his pictures merits a look.

Blonde received scads of poor notices. Justifiably so.

The picture has much in common with Elvis, and you get the sense that Dominik, like Baz Luhrmann, was behind the eight-ball from the outset. Both biopics are devoted to broad pop icons with fixed public personas that, when pierced, reveal soft, dull goo. So, the directors make up for the deficit by untethering the stories from fact, gussying up the visuals, and stretching for a larger point. As with Elvis, we quickly learn a good-looking picture can only get you so far.

Make no mistake. Blonde is a visual feast. But it has no real narrative. We meet poor Norma Jean as a child brutalized by her mentally ill mother, and then she’s brutalized via casting couch, and then she seeks shelter in a “throuple” with two men, who take advantage of her sexually and financially. Soon, Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) shows up out of nowhere, and then Arthur Miller (Adrien Brody), and then JFK, and soon, drugs and death. One calamity after another, one torment replacing another. None of her relationships are developed. Rather, her romantic entanglements just appear, are thunderstruck, and then we move to the next victim/victimizer.

It is all very sad, but watching a film is transactional, and you soon wonder, “Why am I supposed to care?”

Ana de Armas as Marilyn is occasionally effective (in particular, during a riveting audition), but for the most part, she’s a cartoon, cooing “Daddy” (to her own, unknown father and every man she has chosen to replace him) in a breathy, childlike manner at such a rate that you can almost see DiMaggio and Miller thinking, “Yikes! I thought the ditzy bombshell thing was an act? How do I get myself out of this?”

de Armas was nominated for best actress, and much like Natalie Portman in Jackie, the rendition is an over-the-top caricature of a public figure, where their peculiar tics are amplified. When her Cuban accent makes one of many appearances, it doesn’t really bother. There’s just too much else wrong with the performance, as if someone told de Armas to play Marilyn as a perpetual thirteen year old girl. With a concussion.

Not that de Armas was given much to work with. In one scene, she is with the none-too-impressed DiMaggio women, who are making spaghetti, and she lilts, “ooooh … real spaghetti? Like . . . not from a store?”

There’s plenty more where that came from in this ridiculous script. At the premiere of her first big film, as the crowd erupts in thunderous applause for the town’s new star, Marilyn breathily says, out loud, “For this, I killed my baby.”

Hoo boy.

Dominik’s missteps can also be traced to his misunderstanding of Monroe in the American consciousness: “If you spent 70 years enjoying a fantasy of a person; then a movie comes along that says she was not complicit in your enjoyment, it puts you in an uncomfortable position for having enjoyed it. People don’t want to be put in that position; they want her to be the one that created their enjoyment, and was along for the ride, then had a bad year and killed herself. That’s not the way it works. There’s no redemption in suicide. Americans don’t like you to monkey with their mitts too much. They very often want to jump to the solution without looking at any of the trauma.”

I am not unreceptive to some of these observations, but as applied to Monroe, Dominik is just wrong, He is talking about the Monroe of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” which was so long ago (1973, only 11 years after Monroe’s death) the song has been repurposed for Lady Diana (and will eventually be repurposed again when the next pop starlet dies before her time). Americans are not so protective of Monroe that Dominik’s pedestal tipping would elicit a reflexive defense. Rather, in modern memory, she was a sexy, mentally disturbed, marginal actress who sang a sultry “Happy Birthday, Mr. President!” publicly and privately and then overdosed. Side note: has anyone been taken down further in filmic history than JFK? When I grew up, he was the cool, collected president who saved his mates in PT 109 and stared down the Russians in The Missiles of October. Recently, in The Crown, he was a pill-popping whirling dervish. Here, he’s a #MeToo emblem, forcefully cajoling Monroe to perform oral sex on him in what has to be the worst scene in the picture.

I suspect Dominik knows the film fails, but credit him for a stout defense: ”Blonde is a very well worked-out film. Those who don’t think that aren’t watching it. If you sit back and trust that the movie knows what it’s doing, it’ll work.”

It does not. But if you are hot for a visually impressive, near 3-hour movie about a glamorous, vapid punching bag, Blonde is streaming on Netflix.

Filmvetter has gaps. Many gaps. Truffaut, Godard, and Bergman come to mind.

And, until now, John Cassavetes.

I knew that Cassavetes was an influential filmmaker. Martin Scorsese credits two films that most informed his career: Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Cassavetes’ Shadows. Quentin Tarantino also cites Cassavetes, which is strange, for, as one writer observed, Tarantino makes films “in which almost no element comes from life,” whereas Cassavetes’ work is infused with realism. Others who refer to his work include Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, and the aforementioned Godard.

But to me, Cassavetes was the nasty, cynical guy in The Dirty Dozen and the husband in Rosemary’s Baby.

Until I saw this picture, currently available as part of the Criterion Collection on HBO Max.

Ben Gazzara (“Cosmo”) plays a strip club/cabaret owner in Los Angeles, when showing some thigh and breast still required the trappings of a “show”. His stage girls are his children, and he is a small fish in a big pond. He just doesn’t know it. Until his big shot routine results in a sizable gambling debt to the local mob, who decide to absolve him of the “loan” in exchange for lethal services.

The film is visceral and immediate yet leisurely. Cassavetes brings you right in on the actors, often letting the dialogue of others register on the one. I was reminded of Boogie Nights and the long take on Mark Wahlberg right before the drug heist, but while that was showy, if effective, Cassavetes’ style is anything but. Instead, it feels natural, almost a controlled improv. Cassavetes gave his actors maximum room, eschewing the Strasberg Method as tired and narcissistic. Per Matt Zoller Seitz, reviewing Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes: “Among other things, Cassavetes hoped to offer young actors an alternative to the Method, a sensory- and memory-centered approach that was taught, in personalized form, by Actors Studio founder Lee Strasberg (whose students included James Dean, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Elia Kazan, Shelley Winters and many others). Variants of the Method encouraged actors to draw heavily on their own experiences and feelings, and to treat hesitancy and inarticulateness as gateways to truth rather than obstacles to clear expression. A number of Method actors personalized this approach and had great success. But Cassavetes felt that the Method, and Strasberg’s Studio in particular, had become a different sort of factory, and he was ‘…resentful about the power the Studio exerted over casting directors, which he felt was what had held him back early in his career,’ Carney writes. ‘He was scornful of what he called the guru aspects of the Studio and pointedly described his and Lane’s school as anti-guru. He felt that the Method was more a form of psychotherapy than acting, and believed that although figures like (Montgomery) Clift, (Marlon) Brando and Dean had had a salutary effect on acting in the late ’40s and early ’50s, by the mid-’50s the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies…Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turning neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.’”

There is none of that in this film, which feels so authentic as to be revolutionary. The picture is riveting, grounded, and wholly personal, with an L.A. devoid of the well-know landmarks, not purposefully omitted but rather, naturalistically absent. Cassavetes sets up a noir-ish crime pic, but perhaps bored with the endeavor, detours repeatedly into Cosmo’s crisis of identity.

Gazzara is captivating. Cassavetes trains in on Cosmo’s every conceit when playing the big man. Cosmo’s descendant is none other than Burt Reynolds’ Jack Horner in Boogie Nights, a semi-proficient pornographer who makes himself father to the talent and creates his own world, one where he is Fellini. Similarly, Cosmo treats his girls like perpetual prom dates and tells the patrons in his seedy club, “I’m the owner of this joint. I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.”

When his powerlessness is revealed, Cassavetes lingers on Cosmo’s doubt and his insistence on maintaining the veneer of control and aplomb reveals a hollowness that progressively evinces during the film. But there is also decency and honor, one that becomes difficult for even the mobsters to ignore.

Savaged by the critics at the time, a classic.

—filmvetter

Watching them all so you don't have to

Archive

Monthly Archives: March 2023

Blonde – 1 star

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – 5 stars