Not even the best drummer in the Beatles

Rating: 5/10 (18 April 2008)

The story is told about John Lennon that he was once asked whether he thought that Ringo Starr was the best drummer in the world. "Best drummer in the world?" replied John. "He's not even the best drummer in the Beatles".
I have similar views about Charlize Theron's Oscar for this film. Best actress in the world? She wasn't even the best actress in "Monster". Christina Ricci was better by far, but wasn't even nominated either as "Best Actress" or "Best Supporting Actress".
The film is based on the life of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos (called Lee in the film), who murdered seven men while working as a prostitute in Florida in 1989 and 1990. Wuornos was notably unattractive, so the beautiful lads'-mag pinup Theron was hardly the most obvious choice to play her. Nevertheless, the make-up artists managed, with the help of freckles, false teeth and some seriously bad hair, to make Theron look reasonably like the individual she was portraying, although still more attractive than any picture of Wuornos I have ever seen. At one stage she strips down to her underwear, not in order to titillate male viewers but to show the world how much weight she has put on since she last posed, in a similar state of undress, for "FHM" or "Esquire".
Theron is not the first actress to play a notorious murderess; in the fifties Susan Hayward won her only Oscar as Barbara Graham in "I Want to Live" and Diana Dors gave her greatest performance in "Yield to the Night". Dors' character in that film was fictitious, but was loosely based upon the real-life killer Ruth Ellis, whom Dors had known. Ellis herself was played by Miranda Richardson in a more recent film, "Dance with a Stranger".
Although they were playing criminals, Hayward, Dors and Richardson all succeeded in evoking sympathy for their characters. In the film, Graham was portrayed as the innocent victim of a miscarriage of justice (although in real life "Bloody Babs" was probably guilty of the crime for which she was executed). Ellis (like her fictional counterpart Mary Hilton) was the victim of a legal system which failed to take account of extenuating circumstances which should have saved her from the gallows.
"Monster" was clearly aimed at evoking sympathy for Wuornos, but this was a difficult aim to achieve and in my view Theron never really brings it off. Unlike Ellis, who shot her lover in a crime of passion, Wuornos was a cold-blooded serial killer whose real motives are unlikely ever to be known, not least because she kept changing her story. Her one chance of avoiding the death penalty was to persuade the Court that she was mentally unbalanced at the time of the killings, but she rejected this option, sacking her defence lawyers and insisting that she was sane. She originally alleged that she shot all seven of her victims in self-defence, but later retracted this story. In the film Wuornos does indeed kill her first victim in self-defence when he beats her up and attempts to rape her, but kills the others for purely mercenary motives, to steal their money and cars. Her final victim is not even a customer, but a kindly old man who is trying to help her.
Ricci plays Wuornos's lesbian lover, called Tyria Moore in real life but Selby Wall in this film. Selby is a naive teenager, struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, who has been rejected by her conservative, religious parents who regard homosexuality as sinful. They have sent her to Florida to stay with relatives and be "cured" of her lesbianism. Instead, Selby meets Wuornos in a bar and becomes her lover, probably because Wuornos is the only person ever to have shown her affection.
Before "Monster" I had mostly regarded Theron as an actress whose main function was to provide the glamour in bland family films like "Mighty Joe Young" or second-rate thrillers like "Reindeer Games" or "Trapped". Her ventures into more intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) fare like "The Astronaut's Wife" or "The Cider-House Rules" were not convincing. "Monster" represented a quite deliberate attempt to show the world that she is not just a pretty blonde bimbo but a serious artist who is prepared to suffer for her art- even to suffer the ultimate indignity of looking fat and unglamorous. This is the sort of thing which always impresses the Academy, but I found it unimpressive. I found Ricci's portrayal of the tormented Selby a touching one, but Theron never succeeded in convincing me that Wuornos was anything other than cold, hard, heartless and vindictive. If anyone deserved an Oscar it was her make-up artist. 5/10