A superb film.

Rating: 10/10 (26 January 2004)

Italo Calvino's 1972 masterpiece, Invisible Cities, beautifully delineates realms of mind: some that counterpoint each other while others falling within the harmonic progressions of existence. The complexity of being is rarely depicted as successfully as in the film Monster. The story is not new nor is it fiction: The violation of a young girl essentially ends any chance of her living a normal life and she is thus thrown into a timeless path of degradation and progressive declination. What is new here is the power in the volume of truth brought to this production by its creators.

The well-crafted script enters into levels of truth rarely encountered in the American cinema, especially in today's industry. Its subtlety is intertwined with ironies and its brutality plays out in both concord and chaos to her final destruction by the blind justice of today's American, Hammurabian society.
What is also genuinely new here is the astonishing performance of Charlize Theron, an actor originally from South Africa whose past work includes modeling and playing quiet beauties. Here we are treated to a mounting level of skills in the past secluded by the press of her beauty. The greatest surprise is that she was able to make the quantum leap from her past profile into the central arena of screen actors with levels of power not seen for decades. She plays the 1980's female serial killer, Aileen Carol Wuornos, with deftness, fervor and nuance that is agonizing and at the same time wondrous to behold. She looks, acts and smells like gutter trash. We feel her painful hunger for human contact at the same time the desperate loathing that she has for her victimizers. In a final, perhaps planned irony, her final victim, perhaps the only innocent one, is played with great pathos by the extraordinary character actor Scott Wilson who long ago mesmerized us as one of the killers in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

It is also important here to bow to the recent newcomer writer-director Patty Jenkins who with this work has also grabbed off the gold ring. Italo Calvino would smile at this extraordinary, robust and unforgettable film.