Lots of commotion, too few thrills

   

   Dwayne Johnson finds a superpower showcase in Black Adam, the latest entry into the DC Comics Universe. Johnson plays a character with superpowers but his Adam also has a vengeful side, which is supposed to make him more interesting — at least on paper.

   A noise machine built around a flood of unimpressive action, the movie features many battles in which bolts of lightning shoot from the fingertips of heroes and villains. There's enough zapping here to run a zillion microwaves but none of it has much real charge.

   A prologue explains how Adam acquired his superpowers by taking us back the ancient kingdom of Kahndaq where an enslaved Adam loses his wife and young son and finds himself in a state of suspended animation (or something like it) for 5,000 years. 

   Thanks to Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) Adam is revived in present-day Kahndaq,  a Middle Eastern-style country that is being invaded by militaristic thugs. The people of Kahndaq are not free.

   Adrianna comes into possession of a crown (well, it had to be something) that everyone else in the movie seems to want. Why not? It's made of Eternium. Ah, you say, that explains everything.

  Later, Adrianna’s son Amon (Bohdi Sabongui) will be kidnapped and Adrianna will implore Adam to help rescue the kid.

   Another story intersects with Adam’s. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) wants to combat Adam by assembling a special team dubbed The Justice Society. Calling this four-member group a "society" stretches the term, but I guess Justice Quartet would impose too severe a limit on future growth.

   Society members include Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). An idiosyncratic array of powers, none of them especially intriguing, is distributed throughout the group.

    Toward the end, the movie goes sentimental over the friendship between Hawkman and the self-sacrificing Doctor Fate. My heart strings remained unplucked.  

    Adam, who flies but more often seems to float like a balloon in a Thanksgiving day parade, wants revenge for the murder of his wife and son five millennia ago.  Say this: The man knows how to hold a grudge.

   The only looming question: Will Adam unite with the Justice Society to help save Amon, presumably so that the kid can continue skate boarding through Kahndaq’s deteriorating streets?

   The future of a free Khandaq may also hang in the bargain.

   Not enough? Eventually, a character called Sabbac  (Marwan Kenzari) emerges to lead the legions of hell against …well … just about everyone. 

    Oh well, I liked the name. Sabbac has ring to it, don’t you think? 

    The movie makes attempts at humor but they are, for the most part, just that: attempts.

     To make the already obvious even clearer, the movie uses the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black to underline some of the clangorous action. 

      Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s best bit arrives in a postscript that involves a surprise appearance. Talk about too little too late.

    Will there be more Black Adam movies? I don't know but it might be best to say Shazam and hope for the best.

    And if you don’t know about Shazam, don’t worry. You’ll probably be doing something else this weekend anyway.

When evil lives among us

  

   Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne give strong performances in The Good Nurse, a reality-based thriller grounded in the hospital environment in which two intensive-care nurses ply their trade.

   It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that Redmayne's Charlie Cullen is a serial killer whose kindly affect and cunning skill with computer systems enables him to obtain drugs that he uses to murder patients. 

   Gradually, we learn that Charlie has a checkered history. Many of his previous employers regarded Charlie with suspicion. 

   Fearing law suits and bad publicity, hospitals preferred to get rid of Charlie rather than call in the law. Demand for nurses being high, Charlie simply moved to the next job.

   Chastain portrays Amy Loughren, a New Jersey nurse with two daughters and severe health issues. Amy needs a heart transplant but can't take medical leave because she hasn't been employed long enough to qualify for it. Besides, her work-related health insurance has yet to take effect.

   Charlie builds a relationship with Amy, helping her to keep her job and offering support with her two daughters. She sees him as a good nurse and friend -- until she no longer can ignore the truth. 

   Director Tobias Lindholm works in a quiet style that keeps the lid on melodrama with Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich playing hard-working detectives who try to stop the string of killings. A hospital administrator (Kim Dickens) offers little help. Her priority: protect the hospital. 

    Lindholm puts complex issues on the table: the inadequacies of the American health care system, the timidity of medical bureaucrats, and the vulnerability of a good person to someone with heinous motives.

   Not all of these issues register equally but Chastain and Redmayne bring credibility to a story that would seem beyond belief if the core of it weren’t based on a real case involving one of the most egregious violations of trust imaginable.

Cate Blanchett commands the screen in 'Tar'

 

   Tar, an intensely realized drama starring Cate Blanchett as a revered conductor, extends beyond the world of classical music to take a penetrating look at the ultra-successful career of Lydia Tar, a fictional character who represents what we've come to regard as star power.

    The undisputed center of her world, Lydia's personal life can't be separated from her musical life. She lives with her wife (Nina Hoss) and her daughter (Mila Bogojevic) in Berlin. Hoss's character also happens to be first violinist in Berlin's Philharmonic, where Tar presides as principal conductor.

    To ensure that we appreciate Lydia's musical cred, Field opens the movie with an on-stage interview at Lincoln Center. The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik interviews Lydia, giving her ample opportunity to demonstrate an incisive understanding of her role.  

    We also watch as Lydia teaches a master class at Juilliard. She argues with an identity-conscious student who brings an aggressively woke attitude to the work of Bach. At least for this student, Bach represents the epitome of dead white man irrelevance and misogyny.

    The tense exchange suggests that Lydia will encounter more contemporary issues before the drama concludes. Maybe she isn't as shielded as she believes.

    No one questions Lydia's bona fides: She was mentored by Leonard Bernstein ("Lenny" to her) and has conducted in Boston and New York. She has a Ph.D. from Harvard and has won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. She's about to publish a book, immodestly titled Tar on Tar.

    Gender issues? She can't be bothered. She's above them, assured of her position by talent, achievement, and superior intelligence. 

      A dazzling Blanchett fills every scene with agitated anticipation. When she conducts, it looks as if she's mining veins of furious energy.

     The bulk of the story takes place in Berlin, where Lydia is set to record Mahler's Symphony No. 5. She faces problems. Her assistant conductor (Allan Corduner) has lost a bit off his fast ball. Her assistant (Noemie Merlant) has begun to resent her demanding, arrogant boss. 

     Lydia's the kind of boss who promises much but isn't beyond pulling the rug out from under anyone she deems unworthy.

     Jealousy and intra-orchestra rivalry arise when a young cellist from Russia (Sophie Kauer) lands the featured role in Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor, an opportunity a veteran cellist thought she deserved.

     Lydia bristles with kinetic spark. She runs through the streets of Berlin. She attacks a punching bag. Cutting and angular gestures can make her imposing in the way that someone who’s super-smart can be threatening to others.

    The drama comes to a boil when Lydia faces charges of  sexually abusing a young mentee in New York, undermining the woman's career, presumably for refusing the conductor's advances. 

    Field leaves questions of innocence or guilt unsettled -- although the ensuing turmoil leads to an ending that's not nearly as original as the rest of the movie.

     After the story dips into the world of social media and MeToo-ism, it seems to be punishing Lydia for her arrogance in ways that seem both humiliating and, sadly, a bit conventional. The great person's untouchable world collapses.

     Field (In the Bedroom and Little Children) creates a movie of jagged edges, slicing through the narrative like a violinist with a wicked bow.

     For her part, Blanchett isn't just playing a character. She's commanding the movie, pushing the story forward and keeping us glued to the screen as Field demonstrates that power -- even when built on earned authority -- can be abused.  Tar stays with you, possessing you in much the same way that Lydia attempts to possess everything she touches. 

    If Tar were only about power, it would be interesting, but Blanchett’s performance heightens everything, outraging, alluring, and making us feel the consequences of public stature in the hands of someone who has the capacity to destroy, as well as to create.

A murky drama set in Nicaragua

  In Stars at Noon, director Claire Denis' latest serving of ambiguous drama, Margaret Qualley plays Trish, an American  journalist stranded in Nicaragua. Having had her passport seized,  Trish relies on a government connection and on her personal wiles to survive. She raises cash by charging for sex, primarily with a Nicaraguan soldier.

   Daniel (Joe Alwyn), an Englishman in Nicaragua for something vaguely approximating business, pays to have sex with Trish, whom he meets at a bar in his upscale hotel. The two develop a relationship. Both face undefined dangers. Both want to leave the country.

  As the movie unfolds, Trish drinks enough rum to sink a pirate ship, walks in the rain, and acts if she has an inside track on the mostly unseen political machinations that surround her. The country is on the eve of an election, which may or may not happen.

   For his part, Daniel smokes a lot of cigarettes and murmurs about this and that without revealing much about himself. For most of the movie, he's stuck wearing a white suit, even after he's caught in the rain. The suit makes it impossible for him to blend with the locals, which may be part of the point.

   It falls to Denis' two principal actors to fill in narrative blank spots with suggestion. Qualley has the showier, live-wire role, but both actors convey the difficulties of foreigners trying to survive and perhaps capitalize on the chaos of a volatile country.

    Based on a 1984 novel by Denis Johnson, the story has been updated to take place during the height of the covid pandemic, which means the characters carry masks. They sometimes even wear them.

    Eventually, Trish and Daniel make a run for the border encountering more vaguely defined figures as they flee for safety. A CIA agent? Another businessman? A representative of the Costa Rican secret police? All of the above?

     Dripping with atmosphere and sweat, Denis's movie captures the dislocation of  "international lives" being lived by people who would have done well to stay home. She allows the sex scenes to linger, evidence of desire and a desperate need to connect.

     At 137 minutes in length, soaks the movie in atmosphere. 

    Ordinary Nicaraguans (taxi drivers, a motel owner, and waiters) relate to these two bereft characters with varying amounts of helpfulness. Everyone seems to want US dollars instead of Nicaraguan Cordobas.

     I've appreciated the ambiguity of much of Denis' previous work (most recently Both Sides of the Blade) but Stars at Noon tries to turn a quasi-thriller into some sort of statement about ... well ... I'm not sure about what. 

    Sometimes, more clarity is needed to break through what feels like a self-imposed fog.

     

Bob's Cinema Diary: Oct. 7: 'Plan A' and 'The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry’

Plan A

The Nakam was a clandestine group of Jewish Holocaust survivors who wanted to make Germans pay for what they’d done to European Jewry. The group planned to poison the water supply of post-war Nuremberg, considering it an act of justifiable revenge. Not all Jews agreed. The Haganah, a Zionist military organization that also operated in post-war Germany, worried that a Nakam success would turn the world against any attempt to establish a Jewish state. August Diehl anchors the story as Max, a survivor who lost his wife and child during the Holocaust. Will  Max choose revenge or a more enduring response; i.e., a victory for the fledgling state of Israel? That’s the moral territory that directors Dorn and Yoav Paz stake out. The setup couldn't be more interesting. The movie that follows? Not so much. Michael Aloni plays a Haganah operative who asks Max to infiltrate the Nakam ranks so that the poisoning plot can be disrupted. Sylvia Hoeks portrays Anna, a woman who works with the Nakam and faces her own moral crisis. In sum: intriguing subject but the movie isn't nearly as compelling as the questions it raises, perhaps because it fails to bring the drama to an exciting and suspenseful conclusion. Plan A begins by asking us what what we'd do in similar circumstances but doesn't do enough to involve us in the struggle the characters face as they move toward moments of grave consequence.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry 

Gently manipulative, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry combines sadness and sentiment in ways that make the movie feel formatted and formulaic. A.J. Fikry (Kunai Nayyar) runs a book store on an island off the Massachusetts coast. Mired in grief for his late wife, A.J. tries to drown his feelings with drink. Things begin to change when a publisher’s rep (Lucy Hale) tries to interest Fikry in her line. She's particularly enthusiastic about a book in which an old man acknowledges grief and loss. The heart of the movie involves an infant who's left in A.J.'s store. A.J. adopts the infant. The grim clouds hanging over A.J.'s life begin to lift, even though a rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane has been stolen from his apartment. It was supposed to pay for A.J.’s retirement. The story covers A.J.'s life as his young charge grows into her teenage years. A.J. also begins a relationship with Hale's Amelia. Christina Hendricks portrays A.J.'s sister-in-law and David Arquette plays the good-hearted local sheriff. Sprinkled with literary references, the movie eventually tells us how an infant landed in A.J.'s life. But sentiment overcomes sense the longer director Hans Canosa's movie goes on. Based on a popular novel by Gabrielle Zevin, the movie eventually dissolves into a soon-forgotten sigh. 

 

Despite its ambition ‘Amsterdam’ falls short

      Director David O. Russell doesn’t always make things easy for himself — or for an audience.

      In Amsterdam, Russell aims big, offering a tilted comic take on a serious subject: the volatile political climate in America just after World War I and before World War II. 

    Creating a drama that swirls with plot and artifice in the early going, the story avoids disclosing its point until its final act when Russell not only clarifies what he’s been doing but tacks on an unconvincing message about the importance of love and kindness.

    That’s a mouthful of meaning and Amsterdam can't quite swallow it whole -- even with help from a strong cast that revolves around Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and David Washington.

   Bale, Robbie, and Washington play characters who meet during World War I. Assigned to lead a company of black soldiers, Bale's Dr. Burt Berendsen develops a lasting friendship with Washington’s Harold Woodman, who returns from the war to become a lawyer in New York City.

   After the war, Burt helps combat-disfigured vets reconstruct their faces using replacement parts that cover gaping wounds but have a stitched-together look that, to push a point, reflects the movie’s fractured soul. Berendsen’s patients are patchworks.

   Berendsen also suffered grave war injuries. He has a glass eye that Russell uses in comic fashion, abetted by Bale whose hair rises from his head like a garden of untended weeds.

   Married to a woman (Andrea Riseborough) whose family can't abide his mixed breed (Catholic/Jewish) origins, Burt struggles along until he and Harold are drawn into the mystery that propels the movie -- albeit in fitful fashion. 

  The movie's central trio is supposed to discover who killed their beloved military commander, a decent fellow played by Ed Begley Jr.

   Washington plays things fairly straight. During the war, Harold falls for Robbie’s Valerie Voze, a free-spirited nurse who creates art from shrapnel she removes from the bodies of wounded soldiers.

   In a playful interlude the three main characters travel to Amsterdam to recover from the war. Burt and Harold decide to return home, even though they might have continued to live with joyful abandon in Europe. 

   For a time, it seems that Amsterdam’s production design has been influenced by Wes Anderson, who specializes in creating environments that insist on existing on their own terms.

   Amsterdam features a host of talent in its supporting roles, too many to name here. I’ll highlight a few. Michael Shannon stands out as a CIA agent who works with a British secret agent (Mike Meyers). Bird lovers both, they make a fine comic duo.

   In the movie's third act, Russell introduces Robert De Niro as if he were a hole card being turned over by a gambler late in the game.

   De Niro appears as General Gil Dillenbeck, the most decorated marine in American history. American fascists and Hitler supporters are trying to turn Dillenbeck into a frontman for a coup.

    About three quarters of the way through a journey that sometimes seems mapless,  Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy turn up as the bother and sister-in-law of Robbie’s Valerie.

   Loosely based on real events, the movie eventually whips comedy and thriller elements into a political cautionary tale with obvious relevance to the current political environment in which some view elections as inconveniences.

  Fair to say that Russell needlessly complicated a story that might have benefited from more straightforward telling. Besides this period of American unease has been dealt with elsewhere, notably in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which turned into an even better HBO series.

   For me, the always adventurous Bale and Robbie are the mainstays of a movie that tries to capture the ingrained absurdity of human interactions during moments of high stress. Think the Marx Brothers only not as funny and without the anarchic glee.

  Amsterdam doesn’t match Russell’s best work in movies such as Three Kings and American Hustle. Sure, the performances can be tasty but this oddly realized movie often has the feel of an interesting fellow who answers the doorbell without first pulling himself together.

 

‘Smile’ rolls out a horror welcome mat

 

  Smile marks the feature debut of Parker Finn. As many before him, Finn has chosen horror as his letter of introduction. 

   Expanded from a short film by Finn,  Smile doesn’t transcend genre but aims for more than jump scares, creep-outs, and gore — although it has a reasonable amount of all three. 

   Staring Sosie Bacon in a disturbingly agitated performance, the movie attempts to show what happens when a sane person tries to convince others of something that most normal people would regard as crazy. Good luck with that.

    Of course, there’s not much good luck on display in Smile. You might even say that the movie is about the bad fortune that may spring from a dark secret, something that Bacon’s character assiduously has tried to avoid.

      Bacon’s Rose is a psychiatrist who works with severely disturbed patients. She’s not one to listen while bored Gen Xers complain about lack of fulfillment. She’s up for the heavy lift.

     In an early scene,  Rose tries to assure a terrified young woman that she’s not going to die. The newly admitted patient claims that she’s a serious person, a Ph.D. candidate who’s not crazy. 

     Her story: A mysterious entity appears to this young woman in the form of different people. These appearances — seen only by her and  mistaken by others for hallucinations — have an evil smile plastered across their faces, devilish concierges welcoming guests to hell.

    A skeptical Rose begins to question her judgment when her patient commits suicide in front of her, slashing her throat with pieces of a broken vase.

   The movie plays with a notion that’s familiar to those who consider themselves “normal” — or at least capable of operating within the bounds of acceptability: What has been seen cannot be unseen.

    Written by Finn, the movie also weaves an ingenious thread through its story: Those who witness a suicide become the “entity’s” next victim, the next person doomed to be regarded as crazy until the demon (or whatever it is) forces suicide and migrates to its next witnessing host. The cycle of terror becomes perpetual.

       The movie rests on Bacon’s shoulders and she carries it with a bit of assistance from the supporting cast. Rose’s supportive finance (Jessie. T. Usher) believes his prospective wife may have gone ‘round sanity’s bend. Kyle Gallner plays Joel, a former lover and detective who’s drawn into Rose’s drama. Robin Weigert portrays Rose’s therapist. She thinks Rose’s condition might have something to do with her mother, who committed suicide when Rose was a girl.

     Kal Penn turns up as Rose’s boss at the mental institution where she works, and Gillian Zinser appears as Rose’s older sister, a woman who’s mortified and alarmed by Rose’s behavior at her nephew’s seventh birthday party, one of the movie’s horror high points.

      Finn probably relies too much on the movie’s score (alternately creepy or bludgeoning) and errs at the end, I think, when he shows the monster. It should have remained invisible, even if a bit of metaphoric intent is at play here. 

      We already see the story from Rose’s point-of-view. But what if we left the theater with more uncertainty?

      I’ve seen Smile described as better than the usual helping of horror and that seems right. I’ll leave it that, offering restrained appreciation for a movie that isn’t without intelligence but still too beholden to the more obvious demands of its genre.

A gay romcom hits the mainstream

   

  Billed as the first gay romcom released by a major studio (Universal Pictures), Bros arrives in theaters with a stamp of approval from Judd Apatow’s production company and the benefit of having been shown at the recently concluded Toronto International Film Festival. 

    Additionally, the movie was directed by Nicholas Stoller, who has targeted mainstream audiences with comedies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement.  Stoller co-wrote the screenplay with the movie’s star Billy Eichner, a gay comic and actor known for Billy on the Street, a comedy game show that aired on cable.

 I mention all this because the movie’s bona fides suggest big-time ambition. Bros apparently doesn't want to be assigned to some narrowly defined gay niche: It wants to bring everybody on board.

 How you react to the movie depends, at least in part, on how you react to Eichner, who’s playing Bobby, the host of a gay podcast and the movie's main character. 

   Early on, Bobby is appointed as director of the nation’s first LGBTQ+ museum.  Obsessed with gay history and with its purposeful exclusion from America’s story, Bobby presents a problem common to all obsessives: He can be annoying.

  Fortunately, as played by Eichner, Bobby also can be funny. He’s a walking compendium of edgy comments on pop culture, gay life, homophobia, and other subjects that make it clear that he's in the know —sometimes even about himself. 

  And, yes, some of the movie’s humor takes aim at gay culture. In a bar, Bobby and a friend talk about how straight people always think gay people are smart. Many actually are stupid, we're told.

   Later, a major donor to the museum insists that it include an interactive gay trauma exhibit that resembles a fun house ride. Ridiculous, no?

   Evidently well-versed in varieties of gayness, Eichner also gets  comic mileage making fun of gay Bro culture with its commitment to weight lifting, fitness, and ripped bodies.

  Because he runs a museum, Bobby also serves as the movie’s mouthpiece for gay history, presented in breezy fashion but still saddling the story with explanatory chores that are a little too much like a lecture.

 And now for the romantic part of the movie. After meeting at a club, Bobby falls for Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), an estate planner and gym rat who often relates to the world as a jock. 

  The rest of the movie adheres to romcom formula as the romance faces obstacles on its way toward the obligatory happy conclusion. 

  The gay sex scenes are no more explicit than what you'd find in most heterosexual romances, even when Stoller (Remember him? He's the director.) tries for a bit of outrageousness. 

   Eichner and Stoller treat a foursome as an opportunity for physical comedy, later letting us know that Bobby learned from his participation. He's looking for a more committed relationship than he initially imagined.

   There's also a scene in which Bobby meets Aaron’s parents when they make a Christmas visit to Manhattan. They're upstate New Yorkers who accept their son’s gayness but remain conventional.

   A second grade teacher, Aaron’s mother, decked out in a notably untrendy Christmas sweater, receives a lecture from Bobby about why her pupils should be exposed to gender diversity. She thinks they're too young.

   The movie later draws mom into woke circles: She brings her young students to the museum for a tour.

    Mostly Bobby and Aaron dominate the movie. The rest of the gender spectrum finds representation in the museum's staff, a smorgasbord of gender identities that results in amusing intra-staff rivalries.

   I'm not the biggest fan of today's romcoms. I don't do my cinema worship at the altar of When Harry Met Sally. So you'll pardon me for not celebrating the genre as much as Bros might like.

   But will Bros spark a trend of movies that might be billed as identity comedies? Who knows.

    It will be interesting, though, to see how Bros fares at the box office. Movement at the turnstiles may convey a bigger message than the movie itself.

"Blonde' tells Monroe's story -- or does it?

 It doesn’t take long to realize that two voices speak in Blonde, an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe: One voice belongs to the dramatic creation of an iconic movie star. We’ll get to the second voice later. 

 Monroe died in 1961 of a drug overdose. She was 36 and her death spawned theories of foul play that some believe penetrated the upper reaches of American power.

 In Blonde, Ana de Armas plays Monroe with so much wrung-out emotion you may find yourself hoping that the actress was able to leave the work behind at the end of a day’s shooting. 

  De Armas captures Monroe's whispery, girlish voice and her naiveté, as well as the angry eruptions that developed late in her career when she thought she was being dissed by the studios and by directors who treated her as a joke.

  It's one hell of a performance.

   A quick digression: For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, Blonde has been given an NC-17 rating, the first Netflix film to be categorized as unsuitable for viewers under the age of 17. It has nudity and sex scenes, but ....

    I don’t want to get into an argument about ratings here.  Blonde has an NC-17 rating. Let's accept it and move on.

    The second major voice speaking in Blonde belongs to director Andrew Dominik, who works in an overly stylized fashion, sometimes offering surreal strokes. An example of the surreal: A doll-like representation of the fetus the studios force Monroe to abort serves as an eerie emblem of irreparable loss.

    It's more jarring than telling, too self-consciously literal.

    A series of flashpoint episodes make it clear that Dominik, who hasn’t made a movie in 10 years, seriously tried to meet the challenge of what surely will be a much-scrutinized effort, given Monroe's prevalence as a persistent figure in both art and culture.

  But is Dominik telling the story from Monroe’s disorienting perspective — or is it his disorienting perspective? In either case, Monroe’s inner life can seem so tormented it may drive viewers crazy just as it supposedly did Monroe.

    The movie opens with a sustained depiction of child abuse by Marilyn’s whacko mother (Julianne Nicholson in a frighteningly vivid performance). Harrowing scenes of mommy abuse pave the way for one of the movie's amplified themes. Monroe, who never met her father, had big-time Daddy issues. 

   Thus prepped, we watch as Dominik mixes black-and-white footage with color and Monroe’s life unfolds in a series of purportedly telling vignettes.

    Movies such as Niagara, Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot are highlighted when they allow Dominik to make points about the Hollywood-created fictional character Monroe purportedly became. Mired in frustrated need, she becomes untethered from her "real" self.

    The men in Monroe's life exemplify abusive or failed love. Joe DiMaggio (Bobby Cannavale) appears as a character named the Ex-Athlete. Playwright Arthur Miller is called The Playwright and is brought to life by Adrien Brody in a canny piece of work that captures Miller’s intellect, curiosity, tenderness, and betrayal. The Playwright used Monroe's life to feed his writing.

    Both marriages end badly. 

    The oddest of Monroe's relationships is depicted as an early threesome involving Monroe, Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams). Dominik treats this trio as an emblem of isolated innocence with hints of darkness. The three supposedly thought of themselves as bound by fate.

    Sound look hooey? Well that’s how I took it, too.

    Other notable characters crop up in the movie's cavalcade of bad men. Actor Caspar Phillipson appears in what might be the most morally degenerate depiction of JFK (called only The President) to date. 

    Not only does The President exploit Monroe sexually, he does it during a phone call while a Secret Service agent sits at an open bedroom door. To reach the president's bedroom, Monroe is guided past a humiliating gauntlet of POTUS's staff. 

    Revelations about Monroe and the Kennedys are hardly new but Dominik seems to want us to feel the full measure of Monroe’s degradation at the hands of powerful men.

    This exploitative world gives us a Monroe of limited personal agency. It’s as if she landed in LaLa Land for no other reason than to be exploited, a pawn in a cruel image-making game. 

     Dominik puts Monroe’s pain on display and at two hours and 46 minutes, the movie increasingly feels like a chore, its length encouraging a numbed tune-out.

      Perhaps Blonde will rekindle interest and re-evaluation of Monroe’s work or maybe her life will be further pushed into a mold in which the carnal aspirations of a ravenous Hollywood  power culture prove perpetually ruinous.

     Whatever the movie’s fate, Blonde — in the immediacy of its moment — can be an ordeal; flashes of filmmaking brilliance and committed acting notwithstanding, I can’t think of a recent movie that I was more eager to see end.