Play against type, reap the rewards

Rating: 6/10 (8 April 2004)

So another of Tinsletown's beautiful people piles on the pounds for a couple of months, spends a few hours in make-up every morning and walks away with an Oscar. Hollywood is indeed a fickle place. When they need a broad, greasy-haired lesbian serial killer who looks like she's been hit in the face with a spade, who do they pick, but Charlize Theron, one of the most attractive women in the world who, if memory serves, earns a handy extra income by promoting shampoo. Forget about all the aspiring actresses earning five dollars an hour as waitresses in LA diners, most of whom are a good deal closer to Aileen Wuornos in the looks department - lets pay millions of dollars for a celebrity, plaster her in make-up until she's unrecognisable and force-feed her Big Macs.
And of course they are right. A movie like Monster needs a star and a story to make it fly. Most Academy members recognise that if one of their leading lights is prepared to slum it for a while, come off the Atkins diet and slap on some unflattering prosthetics in the name of art, then they deserve some appreciation. Put them through scenes of rape and torture and constantly greasy hair and the Oscar is a certainty. Nobody ever won an Academy Award by acting happy-go-lucky.
As it happens, Theron's Oscar is about the only point of interest in the whole project. In truth, hers in an average performance in an average movie. Wuornos seems to have been a fairly nasty piece of work. A career prostitute, she is on the brink of suicide when she meets Selby (Christina Ricci) in a gay bar. The two strike up an unusual alliance and go on the run together. What follows is an unpleasant, awkward buddy movie - a downmarket Thelma and Louise - with little aesthetic or emotional appeal. Wuornos spends the entire time drinking, smoking, cussing and offing her clients while Selby slouches around in grimy motel rooms. A sort of love borne out of mutual need develops eventually as Wuornos, her trust in men shattered, succumbs to Selby physically, but it is never truly convincing.
That is the trouble with true stories, as the cliché goes, they are often stranger than fiction, and when you throw in two famous, alluring actresses, the bounds of plausibility stretch ever further. Frankly, one gets the impression that Ricci, free from the constraints of half a ton of foundation slapped on her face could do a lot better. Aside from her psychotic tendencies, Theron wanders about with the same crazed bulldog-chewing-wasp expression for the whole film. Maybe she spent too long in make-up and her face dried solid. Either that or she's method acting.
Monster falls in to the trap of introducing hackneyed devices to illustrate the point it's trying to make: The walls in the motels are black with dirt indicating that the whole affair is sordid and dirty; Selby's family life is ultra-conservative so THAT's why she rebels; There is the whole hooker-tries-to-get-regular-job scene that has been done a million times before. I could go on. It has all the hallmarks of a TV movie - I was half expecting high-rolling lawyers played by Brian Dennehy and Harry Hamlin to enter the fray at the trial and get her off on a technicality.
I am being overly harsh. Monster is not a bad film. It just isn't very good. So to give it the Oscar-winning tag is a little misleading.

6/10