An exercise in the art of 'acting'

Rating: 8/10 (29 May 2004)

What Charlize Theron does in "Monster" is called acting. That she does it brilliantly is certainly to her credit; that she deserved her Oscar is probably without dispute; that she has never shown the slightest signs that she could 'act' this brilliantly in the past is also without dispute. I stress this point because Theron's acting is the visible product of what she is doing; you are aware of how well she is doing her job, not because her transformation into Arleen Wuornos is so all encompassing (which it is) but because you know Charlize Theron; you've seen what she is capable of doing in other films. It may even be great acting, (I think it certainly comes close), in the theatrical style. Watching her I thought of other 'great' performances by women (Bette Davis in several films; Vivien Leigh in "Streetcar") but the performance is not transcendental.
She never crosses the line where the divide between performer and character becomes a blissful irrelevancy, where acting is raised to such a level that you cease to be aware of it (Finney in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", Jane Fonda in "Klute", Monica Vitti in "L'Avventurra") As for the film which encompasses this astonishingly empathetic piece of acting I have to say writer/director Patty Jenkins has done a remarkable job. She has made Wuornos not only sympathetic, (ok, Theron has played her part in this, too), but with compassion and not just the angry politics of feminism she has argued a case for a woman's right to kill; at first in self-defence (she is horribly raped) but later in symbolic vengeance for what Wuornos and women have suffered at the hands of men. However wrong-footed you think she's being, it's a persuasive argument.
The film concentrates on the time Wuornos meets Selby, her dim little tease of a lesbian lover (played too blandly for my liking by Christina Ricci) and commits her first murder up to her capture. Her trial, 12 year incarceration and subsequent execution are dealt with in the final minutes (and have already been the subject of two remarkable documentaries by Nick Broomfield). On route to this there are several quite extraordinary scenes, mostly with Wuornos and her victims, but also between Wuornos and Selby and between Selby and the church-going woman with whose family she boarded with, in which Jenkins manifesto is subdued by the trivia and banality of the everyday. I don't think you need to know anything about Wuornos' history to be moved by the tragedy of a woman whose life would never amount to anything other than one blow after another. There is one other performance in the film that merits mention. As Wuornos' final victim, a good man whom she kills almost because she can hardly help herself, an almost unrecognizably middle-aged and portly Scott Wilson, with very little dialogue and only a few minutes of screen time, creates a wholly rounded, believable character in whom we can empathize and who is the antithesis of Wuornos herself (and most of the other men in the film). This is acting of a different kind from Theron's. This is the transcendental kind, where the line between acting and reality is blurred beyond recognition.