Film Review: Monster (2003)

Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs has shown how you can win an Oscar by playing serial killer. Twelve years later the same feat was repeated by Charlize Theron with her role in Monster, 2003 crime drama written and directed by Patty Jenkins.

In the film Theron plays Aileen Wuornos, real life person who created a lot of public interest after media have branded her “America’s first female serial killer”. The plot, which is set in Florida, begins in 1989 when Wuornos, who has spent almost entire adult life by supporting herself through street prostitution and is in desperate need of money, contemplates suicide. Instead, she decides to visit lesbian bar where she would meet young woman named Selby Wall (played by Christina Ricci). Although there are differences in age and Wuornos initially rejects being gay, she soon becomes protective of Selby, who had came to Florida after being chased from by Ohio home by parents who couldn’t have tolerated her lesbianism. Two women begin passionate relationship and begin to live together, with Aileen supporting them through prostitution. One night, while being attacked and raped by one of her clients, she takes a gun and shoots him. This is the first in the series of killings of men Aileen would later justify as self-defence, even when one of the victims (played by Scott Wilson) happens to be kind-hearted man who genuinely wanted to help her. Selby is initially oblivious what is going on but at the end she confronts Aileen who admits the killings. Selby leaves her and Aileen is soon afterwards arrested.

Charlize Theron has deserved her Oscar, if not for quality for performance, than certainly for the unprecedented effort to make the character she portrayed as close to the real person as possible. That included great pains to achieve physical resemblance to Aileen Wuornos. Theron, who is considered to be one of the most beautiful Hollywood actresses of her generation, deliberately gained weight, took prosthetics and applied special kind of make-up in order to make her character as glamorous as possible. All that was accompanied by intense portrayal of a woman who goes through emotional roller coaster – from suicidal despair in the beginning, brief moments of bliss with Selby, murderous rage triggered by violent clients and, finally, feeling of betrayal near the end. Theron is complemented in her performance by young Christina Ricci who plays her character (which is partly fictional and partly based on Wuornos’ real life girlfriend Tyiria Moore) with great skill.

However, all that can’t overcome the fact that Monster is, at the end of the day, just another “Oscar bait” film. Jenkins, who had prepared for the film by visiting Wuornos in prison before her 2002 execution, was probably aware that the audience would know at least a bit or two about the actual killings. So she decided to fill the blanks by reinterpreting her series of murders as a consequence of lifetime of abuse, starting from her own dysfunctional family and continuing through lifetime on the street where he would experience all the worst from men and gradually accumulate resentment that would explode in the most violent way possible. Although Jenkins never condones her acts, she implicitly suggests that at least some of her victims deserved her fate and that Wuornos was some sort of avenger for all the abused and exploited women in the world. This impression is especially difficult to avoid near the end, when character of Selby is portrayed as some sort of Judas. Those who like to read between the lines might even find a little political context, with suggestions that Selby’s family is made of bigoted right-wingers. There is even surreal scene when Wuornos get mercilessly mocked during an attempt to get regular job and turn her life around, that could be interpreted as attack on brutal nature of modern capitalism and social divisions that come to it. That, together with sympathetic portrayal of lesbianism that represented middle finger to conservative ideology of Bush administration, guaranteed that Monster would not only win awards, but be worshipped by critics. While Theron earned praise, Jenkins spent next decade and half working mostly on television before getting opportunity to depict more suitable feminist icon in Wonder Woman.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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