director/screenwriter
Patty Jenkins
producers
Mark Damon
Donald Kushner
Clark Peterson
Charlize Theron
Brad Wyman
cinematographer
Steven Bernstein
music
BT
editors
Arthur Coburn
Jane Kurson
cast
Charlize Theron (Aileen)
Christina Ricci (Selby)
Bruce Dern (Thomas)
Lee Tergesen (Vincent Corey)
Annie Corley (Donna)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (Gene)
Scott Wilson (Horton)
Kane Hodder (Undercover Cop)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 111m
u.s.
release: December 24,
2003
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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Monster is a real-life horror movie -- of
the small but prestigious serious-true-crime-film genre -- that
deserves to stand alongside Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
and In Cold Blood. This particular story has inspired
books, a TV movie (Overkill, starring Jean Smart), two
documentaries by Nick Broomfield, and even an opera. What is
there left to say about Aileen Wuornos, who confessed in 1991
to the highway murders of seven men? A prostitute with a terribly
harsh backstory, Wuornos lashed out at the world, at anything
that threatened her one chance at love -- her relationship with
lover Tyria Moore, who ended up betraying her to the police by
taping a phone call in which Wuornos talked about her crimes.
Writer/director Patty Jenkins
focuses on this doomed love in a loveless life. Aileen (Charlize
Theron), when we meet her as an adult, has been hooking since
she was thirteen. Men disgust her, because she sees the worst
of them at their worst. She denies she's a lesbian, but
when she meets the tiny, girlish Selby (a fictionalized Tyria,
well-played by Christina Ricci in a change-of-pace optimistic
role), something in her is moved. Selby, a baby dyke just tiptoeing out of the closet, has a cast on her arm -- she's like a little bird with a broken wing -- and Aileen takes her in. She wants to take care of Selby,
enacting a husband role -- Selby will stay home (she can't work
with her arm in a cast) while Aileen goes out and makes money
by turning tricks. When one of her johns (Lee Tergesen of Oz,
letting his freak flag fly) goes psycho on her, she kills him
in self-defense. The other six men she kills do little to earn
it except picking her up and having money -- and she needs money
to keep Selby fed.
The real triumph of Charlize
Theron's performance, aside from the cosmetic transformation
you've heard too much about, is that she lets us understand Aileen's
murderous determination while never romanticizing it or excusing
it. This is, undoubtedly, a severely damaged personality at the
end of her rope, and Theron makes Aileen realistically frightening
and unreachable at times. Murder in her hands is certainly not
cool. Two of her encounters with men -- Pruitt Taylor Vince as
a hapless, stammering trucker and Scott Wilson as a good samaritan
-- come to surprising and resonant ends, and Theron's face registers
Aileen's disgust with her company, her world, herself.
This could be the simple story
of an abused woman who finally snapped; her beating and torture
at the hands of her first victim may shock the unshockable, particularly
the sadistic use of rubbing alcohol after Aileen has been violated
by a stick. Yet Jenkins' handling of the murder that follows
doesn't have a remotely victorious tone. Aileen is one of the
lost, one of the people for whom nothing will ever go right (there's
a mid-film montage of Aileen pathetically applying for various
jobs), and her killings don't have the ring of empowerment but
the predetermined knell of a descent further into hell. She goes
home to her lover after one murder, pausing to wash off the blood
in the hotel shower. Past a certain point, if Selby doesn't know
where all of Aileen's money is coming from, it's probably because
she doesn't want to know.
Theron also catches the nervous,
creepy aliveness of Aileen, something I noticed while
watching the actual person in Broomfield's 1992 documentary Aileen
Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Aileen, who was
executed in October 2002, was no dimwit; she was terribly emotionally
stunted, as Monster acknowledges on several occasions,
including Aileen's infamous courtroom tirade (having seen the
real Aileen delivering the obscenities in Broomfield's film,
I can attest that Theron duplicates the moment precisely). Aileen's
answer to just about everything was a closed fist. Though Aileen
later repudiated her own earlier claims that all of her murders
had been in self-defense, Monster looks deeper and sees
a life lived in self-defense.
Broomfield's
1992 film is worth a look for more than just curiosity. The point
of most of Broomfield's documentaries is the Rashomon-like
unknowability of truth -- he ventures into scuzzy outlands, boom
 mike
in hand, and tries to get people to talk to him, like Michael
Moore only a lot more fearless. (Moore generally only has to
worry about being ignored by corporate types; Broomfield routinely
visits the kind of people you'd cross the street to avoid.) In
his first Aileen film, anyway (I've yet to see his more recent
one, Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer), Broomfield
is willing to believe that Aileen is being manipulated and betrayed
by everyone around her. And indeed -- as in Broomfield's later
film, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam -- everyone around
the notorious woman comes off as much more devious and calculating
than she does. In both Aileen Wuornos and Heidi Fleiss,
Broomfield's exertions pay off with a climactic interview with
the lady herself, who seems rather presentable and sane in comparison.
By that point, we've met Aileen's adoptive mother Arlene Pralle
and Aileen's lawyer Steven Glazer, both of whom, it appears,
have convinced Aileen to plead guilty so as to get her the death
penalty and profit off of her corpse. Both of them also unblinkingly
ask Broomfield for $25,000 for the privilege of sitting down
with Aileen (a figure he later manages to reduce). It's also
suggested that Aileen's lover Tyria not only helped the cops
nail her -- she also stood to profit, along with the Florida
police, from the movie rights to Aileen's story. After a shaky
start, Broomfield's film, true to its subtitle, examines how
Aileen may have been fucked over once again by people she trusted.
The irony of it produces something far from laughter. Without
carrying out an Errol Morris-like investigation -- he doesn't
try to argue that Aileen is innocent of her crimes -- Broomfield
ends up exploring a world that cares more about money and deals
than about life and death. When Broomfield finally sits across
from Aileen on death row, hardly a word passes between them on
the subject of what she did or what drove her to it. Questions
start expanding from what isn't said, and then Broomfield leaves
us alone with them.
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