horrifically disturbing movie

Rating: 8/10 (17 June 2006)

I watched Monster last night, and it's one of the very few movies that's ever stayed strongly with me this long after it was over. I had trouble sleeping because the movie's scenes kept playing through my mind, and then I woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep because I couldn't stop replaying the horrifically disturbing scenes of Aileen's life as a prostitute.
I guess I'll comment briefly on Charlize Theron's performance--everybody else has. It was good, but not as great as I've heard over the past couple years. Her facial make-up sometimes seemed like a mask that obscured her expressiveness, but then again, maybe she was playing it a little dead at times to show the numbness that Aileen sometimes must have felt. OK, I'm not sure this will come out right, but I'm just not really into the idea of a very attractive actress dressing down to play a rather non-attractive woman. In a way, and I don't mean to cheapen this by analogy, but it's kind of like blackface. Here we have Hollywood, where beautiful women get almost all the roles available, and out comes a movie with an amazing role that calls for a woman who's not the gorgeous Hollywood glamor type, and who gets the role? A gorgeous Hollywood glamor type. That's what I mean by the blackface comparison--it's a little like having a movie with roles for black actors and choosing instead to cast white actors with painted faces (although Theron's portrayal was not, in itself, derogatory, unlike blackface). It happens all the time--"need an Arab? cast a dark-skinned Italian." In Monster, it's, "need a woman whose life's pain has made its mark on her face and body? cast a woman whose face and body perfectly represent our nation's weirdly skewed ideal of beauty and then make her fatter and, pardon me, uglier." Just doesn't seem quite fair to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the Academy's penchant to give awards for this kind of role (think of Hilary Swank's role for Boys Don't Cry), and part of it probably also has to do with the fact that Theron was one of the film's producer.
Anyway, the film made me feel ill, and that's a good thing in this case. I have a lot of trouble believing that there are so many men who would hire prostitutes along the side of the road (or anywhere else for that matter). Or, rather, I don't want to believe it, but I guess it's sadly not hard to believe. Even more broadly, I think the film is another scathing indictment of a wealthy society that cares so little about its poor, particularly its poor children. I'm not so naively "liberal" as to agree that Aileen's character had no choice but to do what she did to survive, but I think it's painfully obvious that the choices available to her were fewer by many orders of magnitude than the choices available to me, or to people of the wealthiest groups in our nation. What can we do to open up more opportunities for the poor, and when will we do it? Good movie, although I hope I never see it again.