Model Behaviour

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2004)

Crouched by the freeway like a weary bird of prey, Aileen Wuornos (Theron) looks back on her miserable life and contemplates suicide. A meeting with direction-less teenage lesbian Selby (Ricci) convinces her to give life another shot – until she's raped and half-killed by a john, who she shoots in self-defence. Like some feminist Robin Hood (the point's rammed home explicitly), she's soon killing and robbing her sleazier clients to support her girlfriend. Then she begins to gun down innocent parties. Lost in the zone, she hurtles inexorably toward tragedy.
Almost every appraisal of writer-director Jenkins' film has latched onto Theron's unlovely prosthetic, serving to objectify both Theron and Wuronos, and unconsciously mirroring the kind of misogyny Aileen faced daily. Truthfully, she's less ugly than plain – yet the camera seems to 'hate' her too, continually picking over her cornbread complexion and tombstone-teeth. 'I always wanted to be in the movies' Wuronos muses over the opening, and Jenkins pieced her plot together from a series of correspondences with the Death Row inmate herself – not the most reliable source, perhaps, when attempting to tell the 'true' story; documentary-maker Nick Broomfield's already made much of the inconsistencies surrounding the case, and it would have been better to show how the hooker-turned-serial killer became so brutalised in the first place.
If Theron's undoubtedly punishing role, all nervous tics and bravado swagger, results in a skilled impersonation, it's Ricci who neatly steals the movie from under her nose with a subtly-layered performance of quiet depths. But ultimately what remains is a particularly earnest form of Trash-ploitation.