Dirty Pretty Depressing Things (possible minor spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (7 February 2004)

It always seems a little ironic when a brilliant movie is made about miserable little people doing bad things. "In Cold Blood" is probably the best example. Scott Wilson (who's also briefly in "Monster") and Robert Blake were perfect as the guys who killed a Kansas family for about forty bucks but through no fault of their own, the technology and impact of cinema gave their characters a kind of elevated resonance that the real killers (probably) didn't have. If the executed killers could see the movie in some kind of afterlife, I wonder how they reacted to it or if they thought it should have been done at all. I wonder the same about the executed Aileen Wuornos and "Monster."
As the hapless harried prostitute who went down in history as "America's first female serial killer," an unrecognizable Charlize Theron assumes a completely alien physicality that rivals that of Robert de Niro in "Raging Bull." But it would be unfair to credit the make-up department for her performance. It's an absolutely fearless and ballsy job on her part; while of course any thespian playing a real person (especially with lots of "warts") has a kind of background edge, in a way it's even more of a challenge to create an onscreen persona to whom audiences can "relate" when the character is real as opposed to one created out of whole cloth, because there can't be any little "twitches" that don't tally with what the audience members know (or think they know) about the real person. So e.g. in "Monster" we couldn't see Theron hugging a puppy or something because we can't imagine the late Wuornos ever having done that.
Wuornos denied she was a "serial killer" because in her view each of the "johns" she killed did something to provoke it; in the movie the first john-victim is depicted as a misogynist psycho (an almost equally unrecognizable Lee Tergesen from TV's "Oz") who would have killed her if she hadn't killed him. It's then suggested that the other killings had a somewhat premeditated aspect to them, although Wuornos is hardly depicted as being coldly methodical about it--quite the contrary. I suppose Wuornos took the truth about it to the grave with her.
There's a subplot about Wuornos' relationship with a conflicted young lesbian played by Christina Ricci; while I can't claim to know how "true to life" it is, it's compelling enough onscreen. I've never been much of a Ricci fan but she can be effective in the right part, like this one; she's like Wynona Ryder with a kind of sinister undercurrent. Most of the other cast members (all but a few played by unknown actors) aren't required to do much more than look the part. Bruce Dern is a real treat as Wuornos' only friend, a Vietnam vet a step away from homelessness. Why doesn't he get used more?
The movie's overall tone reminds me somewhat of T. Malick's mid-Seventies epics "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," meditations on the dichotomy between "evil" and the somewhat (anti-)heroic stature we attach to it on the one hand, and on the other hand the decidedly mundane and pedestrian aspects of the actual people who do the actual "evil" things. "Monster" is a true slice of ripe Americana filmed on location in Florida where Wuornos lived, killed and died. It's a great little piece of work in quasi-documentary style (which doesn't mean "looking crude" like that stupid "Blair Witch" thing) and I hope lots of foreigners watch it since they'll see us Yanks at our best, our worst and in the middle. Not a single character comes off as being representative of a "Superpower" which I love because neither does any actual Yank I've ever met, including or especially yours truly.
Awards, of course, don't affect a movie's inherent qualities but I'll admit I was happy Theron won the Golden Globe, partly so the movie would have wider distribution. Even though Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" was the tour de force par excellence covering a vast emotional range, Theron had the "Billy Bob Thornton" kind of role, staying rigidly within the character's emotional limits. That, I think, is even more of an achievement.
A few quibbles: I thought "Monster" somewhat breezed past the judicial proceedings and the execution was only mentioned on a title card at the end, but of course that wasn't the thrust of the story. I didn't think it was necessary to have Ricci's Norman-Rockwell-Nazi mother character use the word "nigger" to hint at the lifestyle against which Ricci was rebelling. We had grasped that already. If the movie is ABOUT racism or has it as a strong theme or subtext, then words like that are appropriate. (Quentin Tarantino uses the word when he thinks it's needed, and when its not needed, he doesn't use it.) But just tossed in as a quick jolt seems a kind of cheat.

So what do we "learn" from "Monster"? Maybe nothing we didn't already know, or maybe just to remind us to count our blessings because however each of us may find his or her life lacking or crappy, look around and there's bound to be someone even worse off...
No offense to Floridians but it's my theory that Florida is actually Hell. The guy who buried his puppies alive was there, and the woman who shot her kids and herself only the kids didn't die and had to lie on the floor wounded for a week, and Elian Gonzalez was kidnapped by Federal storm troopers, and Ted Bundy finished up there, and other criminal types, and of course Wuornos, and the latest horror with the girl on videotape. Plus of course there's Janet Reno, Jeb Bush & the Hanging Chads....