How can you show any humanity if nobody has ever shown you any?

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2015)

This film starts just as homeless prostitute Aileen Wuornos is going to kill herself with a gun she ironically keeps for protection, but first she wants to buy a drink with the few dollars she has left in her pockets because she doesn't want anybody to get for free what she worked so hard to get. So she goes down the hill to a gay bar to get her last drink where she meets Selby. Selby is sexually attracted to Aileen, who at first gives her a fierce rebuff. But then Selby tells her a little about her story - how her family is trying to "reform her" from being gay - and Aileen accepts at least some friendship from her, and changes her mind about suicide.
The friendship grows to mutual sexual attraction, and Aileen and Selby run off and move into a motel. Aileen intends to go straight, dresses up for interviews, and gets turned down by everyone. Selby's affection turns to impatience and ultimately angry manipulation as she uses Aileen's attachment to her to get her to go back into prostitution so that they can go out and have a good time. Aileen ultimately gives in, and that's when she meets up with convicted rapist Richard Mallory, whom she claimed to kill in self defense. That is the scenario the movie shows. From that point forward something in Aileen just snaps and she sees every john as a rapist worthy of death, even the ones she had to cajole into accepting her services using sob stories of fictitious hungry children.
The movie is grim and if you read the headlines at all during the late 80s and early 90s you know the story, but just let me say that for once the Academy got it right by giving Charlize Theron Best Actress Oscar. If you've ever seen the actual Aileen Wuornos captured on film, somehow the beautiful Theron got her down even to the wild look she'd get in her eyes - the look of an animal caged.
The movie didn't go too much into the real Aileen Wuornos' past, but all I can say is that she never had a chance given what I read. Born to a teenage girl and a schizophrenic criminal father, abandoned to be raised by grandparents who didn't want to be burdened with her or her brother, and then thrown out of the house by her grandfather after her grandmother's death when she was 15, nobody ever treated her like a human being. I'd like to think the title of this film - Monster - is the ultimate in sarcasm, because what else could Aileeen Wuornos ever have become but a monster given that all she had ever known from other human beings was monstrous treatment.
Highly recommended but very depressing.