Aileen Wuornos, Misunderstood Homicidal Looney

Rating: Null/10 (31 January 2006)

Monster, the life-story of murderous highway prostitute Aileen Wuornos, is the most disarming, sweet-natured movie about homicide you're ever going to see. The real Wuornos must've been the most abrasive, unpleasant person on the face of the earth, but in the hands of Patty Jenkins and Charlize Theron she's transformed into someone almost lovable, a sympathetic misfit who lets her dreams of prosperity carry her away. The naiveté of this conception is striking, and is the reason for the film's success as a personality piece.
What, anyway, would be the point of re-hashing all the tired Lecterian psycho-nonsense about serial killers? Most screenwriters fancy themselves experts on criminal pathology, but not Miss Patty, who views Wuornos' life not in psych 101 terms, but as an example of the warping of the American fabric. In the hands of Charlize Theron, an actress with a remarkable capacity for projecting toughness and vulnerability at the same time, Wuornos becomes a feminist anti-heroine, a Thelma or Louise with the gloves off. Wuornos kills because society has screwed her out of the good-life, and because the johns who become her victims are mostly rats.
It's astonishing how much crap the movie gets away with, and the credit goes largely to Charlize, who projects the radiance of a fallen angel through all her prosthetic make-up. The physical transformation is only the beginning of the performance; the ugly, life-battered surface of Wuornos is merely the shell of a soft, sensitive, gooey creature. Charlize has more than make-up, dirty hair and thirty pounds of evenly-distributed weight going for her; she digs down into her soul, as they might say on Inside the Actors' Studio, and dredges up a whole lifetime's worth of pain and disappointment, capturing the hard-bitten defensiveness of a sad little waif grown into a furiously insecure wretch.
The word "pathos" is unavoidable when describing a scene like the one where Wuornos, decked-out in a suit donated to Goodwill by David Byrne, tries to get a job at a law-firm, and lashes out at the smug jerk who rejects her for such trifling things as having no education or experience. This stuff works because Theron's freakishness is so convincing, and because she plays the anger on the verge of caricature. It's a performance that lives on the edge of being over-the-top, but stays heroically true to the sympathetic-naive-sociological conception. It's a hell of a thing, the way Theron pushes herself deeper and deeper into craziness, and never makes a fool of herself.
Patty Jenkins has a legitimate feel for the tackiness of everyday reality (Solondz used Air Supply in Happiness and it was mocking; Jenkins uses Steve Perry and it's exhilarating). She sees Wuornos as both perpetrator and victim, and sets her ugly existence against the general ugliness of modern life. She gets from Christina Ricci a capable complimentary performance built mainly out of looking directly at things with alien-lost-on-a-distant-planet eyes. Whatever else the movie is, it's a story about two lonely weirdos finding each other, a kind of odd-ball tragic love-story with overtones of social commentary. It's heartfelt liberal claptrap, a gutsier piece of feminist myth-making than the hypey Thelma and Louise, and a more compelling argument for mercy than the didactic Dead Man Walking.