Dir. Patty Jenkins, 2003, USA/Germany, 109 mins
Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern
After Aileen Wuornos's arrest in 1990 for a two-year murder spree, she quickly became labelled as America's most notorious female serial killer. Among the media coverage that followed came two films: the TV network's cash-in Overkill (1992) and, shortly afterwards, Nick Broomfield's sympathetic yet cynical documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling Of A Serial Killer (1992). Now, since Wuornos's execution by lethal injection in 2002, the process repeats itself. First there was Broomfield 's Aileen: Life And Death Of A Serial Killer (2003), and now it's Patty Jenkins's turn to jump on the Wuornos bandwagon and cash in with the much-anticipated Monster, a dramatisation of Wuornos's tragic tailspin into meaningless violence.
You can't help but be cynical when a film takes a glamorous movie star such as Charlize Theron and hands her such a figure-changing role. Casting Chris tina Ricci and Bruce Dern doesn't help this; both are respected actors working outside or on the fringes of Hollywood. The film demands the audience figures of a Hollywood film, while asking for the respect of a decent low-budget indie film.
Such cynicism is warranted. The film's greatest asset is the acting, which often glosses over the weaknesses in the film's style. Theron is undeniably excellent as Wuornos, well deserving of her recent Oscar, and Ricci is also great as Selby Wall, loosely based on Wuornos's real-life lover, Tyria Moore.
The story revolves around their tumultuous relationship, one a fiercely independent prostitute, the other middle-class, shallow and dependent. The two meet one night in a bar, and quickly move in to a hotel together, funded by Wuornos's earnings. When one of her clients turns nasty, she finds it increasingly difficult to go back to hooking, leaving the pair short of cash. While Wuornos begins to kill her clients rather than have sex with them, the relationship grows stormier, and as Wuornos sinks further beyond redemption, the two drift further apart, until neither character nor relationship is salvageable.
The relationship is built on contradictions, and doomed from the start. Wuornos is uncomfortable with who she is and always seems out of place. When she and Selby meet, for example, it is in a yuppie gay bar, when she is neither a yuppie nor gay. Selby, on the other hand, is trying to come to terms with her homosexuality and, implicitly, her middle-class status. Their differences are reflected in the acting styles. Theron's performance is built upon a set of characteristics previously belonging solely to Wuornos, bringing them into play for referential qualities. She shifts uneasily from foot to foot, bobbing up and down and sticking her breasts out as far as possible. Theron refers away from her own position as model and film star, stepping out of the party dress into a completely different person. She becomes a caricature as opposed to an actress simply using her own acting abilities. She's not playing a character; rather she's playing Aileen Wuornos.
The film accentuates the distance between the Selby Wall character and Tyria Moore by taking narrative liberties (Moore was more popular and less isolated than she is portrayed, and often worked as a maid in hotels when money was short. She was also blonde and athletic). The decision to cast Chris tina Ricci is most probably designed to draw attention to her fictional autonomy in the film and distance her from the original person. As with many of her films, Ricci refers back to her own position as an actress (something that has led some critics to label her performance as lazy). As an actress, she is iconic as an insecure figure at the heart of the middle class, which is brought into play here. She is at once the naïve and superficial manipulator of The Opposite of Sex and the bourgeoisie trapped by conformity of The Ice Storm. By bringing herself into the role, Ricci sets up an antithesis to Theron's character.
While the acting is great, the film itself is another matter, and the problem lies in the fact that it filters its serial-killer story through a love story. While Bonnie and Clyde seamlessly merges the lovers' relationship with their increasingly violent encounters, Monster shifts uneasily between the two. Wuornos's downward spiral into violence is filtered through, and framed by, an awkward love story. The two plots are kept broadly separate, overlapping in certain points, such as when Selby finds out about the killings or when they crash a stolen car belonging to one of Wuornos's victims. Jenkins takes the controversial and sensational story of a serial killer and masquerades it as an intimate love story, jumping from one to the other to make sure that we do not spend too much time morally questioning this character.
It is quite remarkable that with such a sensationalist subject, the serial killer is neither redeemed nor condemned. The film begins by aligning us with the lead character, before deconstructing this alignment. So, we open on a close-up with Wuornos contemplating suicide, the most intimate of scenarios, and the film closes with her being led away from us, the final cutting of attachment to the character. In the first of the seven killings, we are asked to understand her actions - she was being beaten and raped and the man probably intended to kill her. But, as the killings become more sporadic, the film moves effortlessly into an objective portrayal. We are no longer watching the same wronged woman but a woman who's passed the point of no return, who believes she is killing monsters when we can see she's killing innocent men. Ultimately, the audience is shifted away from sympathetic subjectivity to the role of objective spectator. The film is painful to watch precisely because it highlights our own impotence - we can only sit and watch as everything falls apart.
Patty Jenkins achieves something extraordinary with such sensationalist subject matter, but it remains a sensationalist and conventional film marred by a clunky and confused love story. Jenkins explores themes of self-identification, concluding that you cannot change who you are. In one of the final scenes, Wuornos returns to her local bar, fittingly named 'The Last Resort', before being arrested by a couple of undercover cops. This is where Wuornos belongs, and this is what condemns her. The narrative turns full circle with the neatness of a Hollywood thriller. For a film adapted from real-life events, made in the spirit of such great films as Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde, what we are given is a meticulously constructed and precise piece of commercial filmmaking, leaving no ends untied.
Simon Bull
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