I’m not a huge fan of film critic David Thomson, and when he published a snarky essay about MM in The Independent back in 2006, my response ended up on the letters page. (So I’m probably not on his Christmas card list either!)
However I do agree with Thomson that Naomi Watts could be a fine choice to play Monroe in a forthcoming biopic. Although she doesn’t resemble Marilyn physically (other than being blonde), Naomi has a fragile, ethereal quality.
“But if the Anglo-Australian Watts had only done David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), she’d be secure in movie history. The way that dreamscape carries her from the archetypal blonde ingénue arriving in Los Angeles, to an accomplished actress in her audition scene, to a wasted wreck, helped make it one of the best films of this century…The key to Mulholland Drive was that Lynch had found his film in Watts’s intriguingly secretive erotic presence…She is set to play Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, based on the book by Joyce Carol Oates. Watts has admitted to being daunted by this, and she is older than Monroe was when she died (Watts will be 43 this year). But Blonde sounds like something that must depend on her, and that’s what she deserves – uncritical love, total trust, a lot of camera time, glamour and huge responsibility.”
My only reservation about Andrew Dominik’s proposed screen adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde is that the novel, while imaginative, plays fast and loose with the facts of Marilyn’s life.
Blonde was previously filmed for TV with Poppy Montgomery, but it was not well-received. Let’s hope that Andrew Dominik (who directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in 2005) can reverse the long trend of mediocre MM portrayals.