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Monster
Movie
Monster

By Subhash K Jha


Wholeheartedly, embrace this film about a malfunctional woman at war with a society that has denigrated and abused her.

Monster isn’t a film-God forbid! It’s much more. It’s a chronicle of our times, a modern frightening fable of the fallible, if you will, where the life of the tortured traumatized female protagonist willynilly becomes symptomatic of the diseased society. A society that we have passed on to the new-millenium generations for whom sex without love isn’t only a possibility but also a pragmatic reality.

Charlize Theron clutches us by our collar and drags us into the pain-lashed life of real-life serial killer Aileen Wournos, who apparently killed several men in and around Florida before she was nabbed and finally put to death .

There’s an inbuilt danger in see-the-criminal-not-the-crime feature films, the danger of creating a sympathy wave around the criminal-protagonist. Fortunately first-time director Patty Jenkins, does a Dead Woman Walking without sentimentalizing the story of Alieen’s one-way journey into hell.

Like Tim Robbins’ Dead Woman Walking where Sean Penn is transformed into a killer in front of our eyes, Charlize Theron gets so much inside the skin and soul of her character that we worry for the actress’ psychological wellbeing. Theron goes far more into the recesses of her character than Penn ever could. The physical transformation is so startling that it may be difficult for audiences to stop staring and raving about this stunningly beautiful actress’ metamorphosis from the sweet li’l thing in Sweet November to the vicious victim in Monster.

It’s a monstrous metamorphosis. Fortunately Theron takes us beyond the character’s obvious physical uniqueness. Kicking dragging and screaming we enter Wournos’ dark psyche. It isn’t a pleasant pilgrimage… and the squeamish are warned to stay from the nauseously graphic depictions of the protagonist’s descent into brutal debasement.

In mood and in the delineation of a working-class woman’s wretched efforts to exist with dignity Monster echoes last year’s Monster’s Ball where Halle Berry too had given an Oscar-winning performance as a woman trying to support self and loved ones. Berry’s character had come to a fulfilling finale.

There‘re no silver linings to Aileen Wournos’ clouded existence. In a ironical voiceover she informs us that she was raped repeatedly as a child by her father’s friend. The psychological and physical rape doesn’t stop as Wournos life as a hooker is brought to life in writer-director Patty Jenkins’ language of the human heart. It is so tragically sordid and so true to the vision of hellish self annihilation that we wonder who suffered more: the actress who played the protagonist or the director who seems to have inhabited her creation’s mind .

There’s a haunting love story supporting Wournos’ basic degeneration from victim to victimizer (actually the two roles remain as interchangeable for Wournos as they are for most of us) . The lesbian love affair between Wournos and the repressed small-time schemer Selby Wall is so ruthlessly, stripped of all eroticism, that what we see is two women blurting out the prayers of their mutual bankruptcy from the brink of self annihilation.

To be sure Theron’s Wournos wouldn’t work were it not for Christina Ricci’s complementary performance as the selfserving soul-mate who wants to escape her cloistered life and sees Wournos’ reckless rage as a means to do so. Ricci who once played the freaky child in an occultist family in The Addams Family transfers her inherent intimacy with the bizzare into a role of a manipulative yet vulnerable chld-woman.

Theron and Ricci make the the perfect imperfect-couple. From the selfserving snivelling of Ricci, to the raging sociopathy of Theron…. Monster maps out the morbid manoeuvres of irreparably wounded hearts.

This isn’t a pretty picture. Nor is it a film that you can relax with on a rainy afternoon. Debutant director Patty Jenkins’ slice-of-life drama slices across the very essence of life to look at the dark and unbearably ugly existence at the fringes. Much of the film shows Wournos cruising in customer’s cars. Doing unmentionable things wuth their body as they do unto her mind and soul . Either she’s doing them, or they’re doing her. Either way, every encounter brings her closer to self destruction.

By the time Wournos comes to her last encounter with a benevolent patriarch who offers her a home and chance to reform, we know her game is over. As she topples over the precipice in front of our horrified eyes we wonder, not for the first time during the course of this incredibly disturbing study of dehumanization, is this what we do to those who cannot cope with the demands of a complex and contradictory social structure?

I wouldn’t like to slight this profound and substantial film by saying Charlize Theron’s film towers above its other undoubtedly strong merits. But yes, a century from now she’ll be remembered by this ‘performance’ which isn’t a performance at all. As far as actors assuming real-life personalities go, Theron gives Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi a run for his mendicant’s money.

Monster reminds us of a cinematic fact that we tend to ignore. High art isn’t only about feeling good or achieving catharsis, or getting your rocks off. It’s also about entering lives so wretched that you look at heaven with relief and despair. Despair for the doomed Wournos of the world. Relief that you , the audience, have a better deal in life.