Acting Tour de Force

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2006)

When I was watching this movie I asked myself how on earth someone as coarse, and raw looking as the Aileen character could ever have become a movie actress. When I saw in the credits it was the glamorous Charlize Theron from Cider House Rules I just about fell out of my chair.
She plays an obnoxious whore, drunken, loutish, belligerent, crazy.
Yet you stay sympathetic even as she becomes deranged and murders. She is completely believable with the pulled down sneer, the accent and the body language. Even the drinking scenes were completely believable.
It could be described as a bleak version of Thelma and Louise. It is grim and makes the point, life is not fair, nowhere near.