Fundamentally flawed with old-fashioned views of women

Rating: 2/10 (22 June 2005)

Charlize Theron is great in this movie, but her performance is the only good thing about it. It's too bad the rest of the movie is so artificial. First of all, a lot of reviews crow about how truthful the movie is and how it sticks to the facts. How could anyone possibly know what the truth really is unless they were there? Maybe Selby's mother wasn't some straitlaced two-dimensional prude, maybe she was just a protective mother. Think about that for a minute.
My biggest problem with this movie is the pretension of assuming that a woman couldn't be inherently evil, that a woman over the edge must have gotten that way because of a never-ending parade of misdeeds visited upon her by cartoonishly violent or egotistical men. For example, why would any lawyer interview a person without first looking at their resume and THEN invite them for an interview? But no, the lawyer scene doesn't happen in any real context, it's designed so that Aileen can nurse yet another grudge against men, who in the movie are shown, again and again, to contribute to her deteriorating mental state and poor decision making. Aileen doesn't act on her own, you see, it's all those damned men who are making her crazy. She couldn't just simply be an evil person, she has to be manipulated into being evil by evil men. I'm surprised that so many people who like this movie can't see how pretentiously old-fashioned and misogynistic this viewpoint really is. What is this, the 1940s? I've got news for you: no one ever figured out Ted Bundy and no one ever will. Thanks to Florida's zealous legal system, no one will ever figure out Aileen Wuornos either. She was an enigma. Why did she kill seven men? The movie shouldn't have tried to explain Aileen's rampage by showing possible catalysts for her behavior, it should have simply told the unembellished story, and not one that was solely from her point of view.