Audacity, Craft and Humanity

Rating: 10/10 (21 October 2010)

It's not that there's not the occasional film about unattractive women, or average-looking without magic cheekbones, with enough body fat to feasibly menstruate. It's that they'll hire statuesque, ideal blondes who'll gain artistic weight, sit for three hours of makeup to facilitate the appearance of a simple human being like the rest of us. Should a film about a real person be in competition for a Best Makeup Oscar? Nevertheless, all the same, what Theron pulls off isn't a performance but an incarnation. With audacity, craft and humanity, she purely draws us into Aileen Wuornos' final frantic attempt to be a better person than her luck proposed. Her performance is so concentrated and forceful that it becomes a reality for us. There's no trace of negligence in her eyes as she directly imparts what she's feeling and thinking. There's the eerie impression that she's forgotten the camera and script, candidly focusing her notions of Wuornos.
Watching this, I've no awareness of makeup procedure. I simply watch one of the realest people on the screen. The movie opens with Aileen telling God she's down to her last $5, that if God doesn't lead her to spend it right she'll end it all. She walks into what happens to be a lesbian bar and meets the 18-year-old Selby, who's been sent to live with Florida relatives and be "cured." Aileen's steadfast that she's had no lesbian encounters, and to be sure her rundown life as a bottom-rung hooker's left her with no predilection for sex at all. Selby's own sexuality works effectively as a way to offend her fundamentalist parents and indulge her longing to be wanted. There's a striking scene when the two bond with unrefined sexual vigor, but in time sex is irrelevant judged against distraction, watching TV, and acting out their personal soap in second-rate curb motels.
Monster's partially derived from the real Wuornos' prison letters to an associate recounting her life and her despairing relationship with Selby Wall, but you can't help but wonder how can we bank on what she says about herself? How can we be sure about those letters' truth or sentiments? Certainly, there'd be truthfulness to be found in them, detecting hidden meaning, analyzing, deciphering, but Monster plays so directly that there are no angles to contemplate, no veils we might be on the brink of peeling away. However, that's the irony of telling the story not as an omniscient investigative report but as a subjective dramatization: Aileen was an wild, unrestrained personality behind a face aged before its time, devastated by sun, booze and all varieties of cruelty. Psychotic, maybe. Beset with rage, unquestionably. Not a sound woman at all, whether or not she'd never killed.
Aileen's proudly the guardian and bread-winner, also bringing back cars that Selby doesn't ask too many questions about. Does she know that Aileen has begun snuffing her customers? She does and doesn't. Aileen's murder binge becomes considerable long before Selby focuses on it. The crimes themselves are set off by Aileen's hatred for prostitution, a lifetime's disgust for how men have treated her since she was a child. She's but one male friend, a devastated Vietnam vet and fellow drunk. Although she first kills in self-defense, she's also lashing out against her past. Her encounter of love with Selby brings revolt disentangling from her memories. The most disturbing scene is the death of a good man who truly wants to help her, but has appeared so late in her life that the only way he can help is to be gotten rid of. Aileen tells her story, and her voice, both narrating and on-screen, seems from some angle to be the vehicle for the story, if not its whole reason for being. But each character within it speaks with their own voice.
Aileen's body language is startling and captivating. She doesn't know how to inhabit her body. Theron spends a range of small arm straightening, physical adjustments, head tosses, hair touchings, as she apprehensively attempts to shake out her anxiety and look composed. She handles her cigarettes with the insecure bluster of a 13-year-old trying to make an impact on a kid. There's but one moment in Monster when she appears comfortable, content with herself. The scene will account for itself.
Christina Ricci finds perfect pitch for Selby, so persuasive some take it for bad acting, when actually she's very moving in her rendering of a poor actor. She plays Selby as naive, weak, in over her head, picking up signals moment-to-moment, paving her actions out of ideas sponged from bad movies, old songs, barroom romances. Selby must've walked into a gay bar for the first time just a few weeks ago, and looked anxiously to fathom how to present herself. Selby and Aileen frequently try to extemporize the next line they imagine the other wants to hear.
Despite questions outside the material itself, Monster declines to objectify Wuornos and her acts of violence, to take advantage of her legend in the disparaging approach of true-crime sensationalism, persevering in seeing her as a fully dimensional person entitled to our consideration. She's been so viciously misshapen by life that she seems incapable of decency, yet when she loves for the first time, she's moved to strive to be a better person.
She's tragically unfit for this mêlée, and doesn't have the assistance of cleverness and reason. She's empty of normal honorable principles. She's brash, uncontrolled, outraged. There's no justification for what she does, but there are causes. The aim of the movie's to bring them to the fore. If life had given her anything whatsoever to use, it'd be a much different story.