Monster English Movie
Wholeheartedly embrace this film about a malfunctioning woman at war with a society that has denigrated and abused her.
"Monster" isn't just a film! It's much more. It's a chronicle of our times, a modern, frightening fable where the life of the tortured, traumatised female protagonist willy-nilly becomes symptomatic of the diseased society we've bequeathed to the new millennium generation for whom sex without love isn't just a possibility but also a pragmatic reality.
Charlize Theron clutches us by our collar and drags us into the pain-lashed life of a real-life serial killer Aileen Wournos, who apparently killed several men in and around Florida before she was nabbed and finally put to death.
There's an inbuilt danger in see-the-criminal-not-the-crime feature films, the danger of creating a sympathy wave for the criminal-protagonist. Fortunately, first-time director Patty Jenkins does a 'Dead Woman Walking' without sentimentalising the story of Wournos' one-way journey into hell.
Like Tim Robbins' "Dead Man Walking" where Sean Penn transformed into a killer in front of our eyes, Charlize Theron gets so much inside the skin and soul of her character that we worry for the actress' psychological well-being.
Theron goes far more into the recesses of her character than Penn ever could. The physical transformation is so startling that it may be difficult for audiences to stop staring and raving about this stunningly beautiful actress' metamorphosis from the sweet little thing in "Sweet November" to the vicious victim in "Monster".
It's a monstrous metamorphosis. Fortunately, Theron takes us beyond the character's obvious physical uniqueness. Kicking, dragging and screaming, we enter Wournos' dark psyche. It isn't a pleasant pilgrimage...and the squeamish are warned to stay from the nauseously graphic depictions of the protagonist's descent into brutal debasement.
In mood and in the delineation of a working class woman's wretched efforts to exist with dignity, "Monster" echoes last year's "Monster's Ball" where Halle Berry too had given an Oscar-winning performance as a woman trying to support herself and loved ones. Berry's character had come to a fulfilling finale.
There're no silver linings to Wournos' clouded existence. In an ironical voiceover, she informs us that she was raped repeatedly as a child by her father's friend. The psychological and physical rape doesn't stop as Wournos' life as a hooker is brought to life in writer-director Patty Jenkins' language of the human heart, so tragically sordid and so true to the vision of hellish self-annihilation that we wonder who suffered more: the actress who played the protagonist or the director who seems to have inhabited her creation's mind.
There's a haunting love story supporting Wournos' basic degeneration from victim to victimiser - actually the two roles remain as interchangeable for Wournos as they are for most of us. The lesbian love affair between Wournos and the repressed small-time schemer Selby Wall is ruthlessly stripped of all eroticism.
To be sure, Theron's Wournos wouldn't work were it not for Christina Ricci's complementary performance as the self-serving soul mate who wants to escape her cloistered life and sees Wournos' reckless rage as a means to do so.
Ricci, who once played the freaky child in an occultist family in "The Addams Family", transfers her inherent intimacy with the outré into a role of a manipulative yet vulnerable child-woman.
Theron and Ricci make the perfect imperfect-couple. "Monster" maps out the morbid manoeuvres of irreparably wounded hearts. This isn't a pretty picture. Nor is it a film that you can relax with on a rainy afternoon.
Debutant director Patty Jenkins' slice-of-life drama slices across the very essence of life to look at the dark and unbearably ugly existence at the fringes.
Much of the film shows Wournos cruising in customer's cars. Doing unmentionable things with their body as th
MOVIE REVIEWS