'I was raised in America, and America hates me for what I am. I am YOUR sh**, you should be ashamed of what you have eaten.'

Rating: 10/10 (13 July 2004)

My compliments to the musical tastes of anyone who can place that quote. Hey, you wanna know what I'm getting sick and tired of? I'm sick and tired of hearing the phrase 'America's First Serial Killer,' if only because it's generally a phrase used to promote Monster, the stunningly well-made and effective movie about Aileen Wuornos, who was not in any way a serial killer. Serial killers kill people because of the order that their names appear in the phone book (the Terminator did, anyway), because of their addresses, certain physical or even behavioral characteristics, whatever. Basically they are targeted based upon a quite often arbitrary set of circumstances. Aileen Wuornos killed people because she was so psychologically damaged by the experiences she suffered in her life and because of her desperate attempt to earn (if you could call it earning) something real and pure and happy for herself and her newfound love. If nothing else, the fact that she is motivated by her desire for a better life and to be a better person separates her from the classification of 'serial killers.' Besides that, she was hardly killing off the best people that society had to offer.
Charlize Theron's performance is probably the most famous performance of 2003, although not entirely because of the positive chatter that it generated. The way that she captures and becomes Aileen Wuornos is astonishing, even if you go into the movie looking for Theron under the make-up from the very beginning. It's as if she does not try to justify the amount of work needed to transform her stunning appearance into that of a hardened prostitute, but rather was transformed into that person, through the make-up as well as her own physical transformation. There's nothing more pathetic than people who complain that Theron didn't act, it was the make-up delivering her performance in this movie. PLEASE. On second thought, there are things more pathetic than that, and several of them get killed off in this movie.
The movie does a pretty impressive job of walking the tightrope of the line between depicting how sickening these people are that Aileen kills without leaning toward the appearance of justifying her murders. But the thing that the movie wisely focuses on is the way that Aileen's life led her to what she became, straight from childhood, and the way she tried so hard to become something good and worthwhile. She tried so hard, in fact, that they made a movie about her.
It is an important fact that Aileen's first murder was in self-defense, and that afterwards she found herself with a car and a few dollars in her pocket. It was presumably the only thing she had ever done other than what really can be called nothing but rape or sexual torture from which she profited in any way. And like the first time Charlie Chaplin saw people tossing coins and cheering at him after he ran onstage and sang a song when he was just a little kid, Aileen saw that this was something that she could make enough money from not only to earn a living (as was Chaplin's epiphany), but to get away from prostitution forever. Prostitution has destroyed her sexually, and given her experiences with the first guy she kills, it's not hard to see why she hates it so much. Interestingly, it is not immediately clear in this situation who is the victim of whom.
Christina Ricci delivers a flawless performance of the naïve 18-year-old lesbian who falls in love with Aileen and ultimately wins Aileen's love as well, despite their tense first meeting. Ricci's shy demeanor and disarming cuteness are exactly what are needed to portray a kid getting into something that she really doesn't understand, all the while not noticing (it's hard to pinpoint when exactly she knows what's going on and when exactly she allows herself to believe it) what Aileen is doing in order to get them the life that they are both dreaming about. I would be curious to know what ever became of Selby Wall. The movie doesn't explain that much at the end other than to say that she and Aileen never spoke again. Sad but not entirely surprising. Multiple murders tend to put a damper on short-lived relationships really based mainly on lust and mutual, superficial needs. And by the way, this is probably just me, but Ricci looks exactly like Edward Furlong in this movie. They could be twins.
Except for all that crap about 'America's First Serial Killer,' Monster doesn't take Aileen's story and turn it into an excuse to make a big Hollywood movie, but rather presents a different way to look at someone who has committed the crimes that Aileen has. The movie is about what a capitalist society, and even the very people charged with seeing after the safety of the people in that society ('The police used to watch over the people, now they're WATCHIN' the people,' my compliments again to the musical tastes of anyone who can place THAT quote), can do to create what Aileen Wuornos became. And the important thing to notice is that the movie is able to do that without offering any excuses for her murders. It's not a film about how someone was sentenced to death who didn't really deserve it because what she was wasn't really her fault, it's about what kinds of things can lead a person to such a life. Have you ever heard a story about some heinous crime and wondered how people get like that? Here are some ideas. Dismissing such people as monsters and executing them is a great way to get them off the street and stop their killing, but it's not really going to get us anywhere as far as preventing that behavior from surfacing in someone else.