Charlize Theron
Monster review
****
It’s got the energy of shocksploitation trash, the insights of shrewd psychological drama and, most importantly, it’s got a barnstorming performance from Charlize Theron
Peter Bradshaw
Friday 2 April 2004
A
ileen Wuornos - prostitute, serial killer, superstar. The trajectory of her hideous career is completed by this sensationally watchable and superbly acted true crime biopic from writer-director Patty Jenkins. It's got the energy of shocksploitation trash, coupled with the insights of shrewd psychological drama. Most importantly, it's got a barnstorming performance from Charlize Theron, in full "ugly" makeup, as the killer herself: strutting, swaggering and sobbing her way to destruction.
Wuornos was the itinerant hooker with a history of poverty and child abuse convicted in Florida in 1990 for killing seven of her johns - at least - and who then spent the next 12 years in the shadow of the hangman's noose, or rather the lethal injection needle of Governor Jeb Bush.
The two documentaries about Wuornos by British director Nick Broomfield, at the beginning and end of her time on death row, took very different views. The first was sympathetic to Wuornos's claims that she acted in self-defence, the second, 12 years later, looks askance at her final desperate abandonment of the self-defence claim; Broomfield suggested that she was suicidal and was effectively longing for the state to put an end to her misery.
Jenkins's fictional drama subtly negotiates with the self-defence theory in this movie, and Aileen Wuornos is not exactly a feminist icon. Some of her victims are certainly brutal rapists consumed with hate, who delight in abusing and assaulting prostitutes. Others, however, are muddled but decent men, who do not try to abuse Wuornos, and even try to help her. But in every case, the basic dynamic is the same: they are men with the money and power, and Aileen has none.
As time goes on, Wuornos realises what many male killers realise: that the furtive prostitute-client transaction makes things very easy for the committed murderer, and in her pathetic and resentful way, she glimpses the one thing she's talented at: being a serial killer.
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| Charlize Theron in Monster |
Who would have thought that Charlize Theron would have been this successful as Aileen Wuornos? Her so-so performances in so-so movies like The Astronaut's Wife, The Cider House Rules, Sweet November and The Italian Job gave no hint of it. But having intensively studied the real-life Wuornos on tape, she gives an eerily clever and well-observed impersonation.
Brown contact lenses create the glassy, belligerent stare; prosthetics conjure the flaky skin. She does some scarily real "bring-it-on" body language, whipping her head to lash her hair out of her face, hunching her neck and squaring her shoulders as if her life is one long bar fight, occasionally baring her teeth in a heartbreakingly needy and vulnerable smile.
Having mastered the surface, Theron then burrows beneath it and ignites a technical firework display of acting which affords pleasures most stars are unwilling or unable to provide. Theron's gutsy Academy award-winning turn is a refreshing change from her milquetoast predecessors in the Oscar hall of mediocrity.
Her Aileen is a sad but harmless case until she conceives a passion for confused teen Selby, in which submissive and self-regarding role Christina Ricci is well cast. With romantic gallantry, Aileen sets up her lover in a hotel room and then a shabby apartment, and sets about earning money as a breadwinner, at first planning to give up prostitution.
She makes a wince-inducingly misjudged job application as a paralegal and the scene in which she shows up for an interview is an unwatchable masterpiece in grisly black comedy. Tragically keen to make a good impression, Aileen styles her clothes and hair in a ghastly, unconscious parody of how a respectable professional person is supposed to look. She is humiliatingly rebuffed by the lawyer who can't believe that this trailer-trash flotsam with her joke resumé has had the nerve even to soil his office. So Aileen returns to her old trade, which spirals into violence and tragedy.
One of the most skin-crawlingly horrible moments comes after Aileen has been forced to give a blowjob to a corrupt cop in some grim car-park in return for not being busted. Back on the street, numb with her habitual self-loathing and resentment, she glimpses, in the trash, a newspaper report of one of her killings. Without realising it, a grin of pleasure flits across her face. At last, it seems to say: some self-esteem. Some status.
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| Charlize Theron in Monster |
Patty Jenkins demystifies and demythologises what her "serial killer" is. Aileen is not a Hannibal Lecter figure, fanatically obsessed with the psychotic method in the madness of repeated homicide. She is furthermore very different from Roberto Succo, the real-life Italian serial killer who defied French police in Cédric Kahn's recent movie.
Jenkins is not proposing Wuornos as an existential heroine whose career is an anarchic rebuke to the settled order of things. She is an ordinary person who rationally assesses the advantages in killing, and then allows it to become a habit. The gender reversal is key to this. A male serial killer who murders prostitutes may indeed do it for the pleasure; Aileen has to do it for the money, and kills with the same weary, faintly panicky distaste that she sold sex.
Wuornos is, above all, poor. She comes from a world little shown in the movies, in books, on television or anywhere else: the unglamorous, hardscrabble world of having no money and no love, living in a mean world below the breadline.
In this desperate life, Aileen and Selby's affair is all the more pitiable and even tragic, given that poor Aileen, whose dozens of killings can't efface the stain of her victimhood, is doing it all for her lover. Patty Jenkins's movie has a tough, illusionless clarity coupled with a gripping sense of drama. It's the work of a natural film-maker.
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