harrowing

Rating: 9/10 (25 February 2007)

I saw this movie well before the Oscars were announced, and I remember thinking Charlize Theron's nomination (and subsequent win) was well deserved. While I was watching the movie, I found myself startled into tears more than once. I can't say I felt sorry for Aileen Wuornos, exactly, but having met and sympathized with real life prostitutes, I found the portrayal of a life gone wrong very sad and moving.
The story is the "true" story of Aileen Wuornos, often called America's first female "serial killer," which if you know your jargon is a misnomer. She was technically a spree killer, but that doesn't matter--she killed a number of men for profit (money and cars, according to the movie) in a relatively short period, and was put to death shortly before the movie was made (2000, I think).
Charlize Theron's performance was bang-on accurate, not in how she looked (people made much of the prosthetics and weight gain), but in the aggressive, desperate quality of Wuornos' character. If you watch the old news clips, or the documentary Aileen, you can see how jittery and furious she was. Not only did she commit violent crimes, but she managed to justify them to herself. The character is sympathetic without making you feel like she's gotten away with something, and I find this an interesting theme in movies where women commit violence. Unlike the action heroes in say, Schwarzenegger or Stallone movies, where bodies pile up and no one has to answer for them, Theron's character in Monster shows the horrifying results of being both a victim and a perpetrator of extreme violence. While one sometimes leads to the other, it's never alright, no matter how bad you may feel for the people on-screen, or the lives they've led that brought them there.
The one downside to the movie that made me feel sad and uncomfortable was the Hollywood Beauty Myth. At the heart of most love stories, which Monster ultimately is, is the idea of a genuine love that motivates and elevates its hero to be something better than he could have been. Unfortunately, it only seems to be the beautiful people who can find this kind of love. If you're ugly, the movie insinuates, all you're allowed is something sick and desperate, and you have to take it where you can get it.