"Let's drop the goo-goo routine, you can't be as dumb as you look", the studio head known as Mr R (an avatar for 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F Zanuck) tells her just before he sexually assaults her. Montgomery plays Marilyn as an overly grateful and naive woman-child, saying please and thank you to the very men who dismiss and debase her. Both Marilyn and the men she was close to get to have their say. With each character speaking directly to the camera, verbalising their point-of-view as the scenes unfold, it's a less exploitative adaptation and a more psychoanalytical one. Chopra's version channels the cruelty of Marilyn's life without displaying the surgical coldness of Dominik's film. Dominik's is not the first Blonde screen adaptation – that was Joyce Chopra's 2001 TV movie, which starred Poppy Montgomery. Oates' Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a fictionalisation of Marilyn's life, narrated from the point of view of a deeply traumatised and lonely woman, in love with movies and the idea of love, but desperately crippled with daddy issues that infect every single relationship she develops.
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