Monster (2003) Review
8/10
A woman sits under a bridge in Florida with five dollars, having decided to spend it on beer and then kill herself. She goes into a bar, meets somebody, and does not.
The 8 is for a film that does the hardest thing available with this subject, which is to present a person who murdered seven men without either excusing it or flattening her into a type. Aileen Wuornos did what she did and the film declines to resolve what to make of it.
What it is not is a true crime picture. There is no investigation, almost no police presence, and the narrative is a relationship between two women over roughly a year.
The Transformation Is the Least of It
The weight gain, the teeth, the skin and the eyebrows were the story at the time and they are the least interesting part of the performance.
What Theron really does is physical in a different way. Wuornos here occupies space aggressively, holds herself as though expecting to be hit, laughs too loudly at her own jokes, and cannot stop talking when she is frightened. The walk is the detail everything else hangs from. It is a specific gait that reads as somebody who has been outdoors for years.
The voice is the other achievement. It is not an impression of the recordings, it is a register, and it moves between wheedling, aggressive and childlike within single conversations depending on what she needs from whoever she is talking to.
Theron also worked from the actual correspondence. Wuornos wrote a great many letters, the production had access to them, and the specific self-mythologizing in the performance comes from a documented habit and not from anything that the film has gone and invented on her behalf more than a decade after any of it had happened to her.
Roger Ebert called it one of the greatest performances in film history, which is an enormous claim and is not obviously wrong. It is certainly the best thing any actor has done with this category of material.
Physical transformation is the easiest part of a performance to praise and almost never the part doing the work. The reader notices what changed and responds to what did not. For a writer the equivalent is describing appearance. It is the least efficient characterization available and the most tempting.
Find the gait. A specific way of moving through space tells the reader about years of a life in a sentence.
A voice that changes register according to need is a person who has learned that being liked is survival. That single decision carries more backstory than any flashback.
The Relationship Is the Structure
Christina Ricci plays Selby, a young woman who has been sent to live with relatives, is lonely, and attaches to the first person who is kind to her.
The film is a love story and it is not a sentimental one. Selby is needy, is somewhat cruel without intending to be, keeps asking for more than Aileen can provide, and is the reason the killing continues after the first one. Aileen is not killing for money. She is killing to keep somebody who will leave if the money stops.
That is the film’s structural engine and it is why the relationship gets the running time instead of the crimes. Each murder happens because a relationship requires maintaining, which is a considerably more uncomfortable motive than any of the alternatives.
The film is careful not to make Selby a villain. She is young, has very little idea what is happening, and the film’s position on her is exactly as unresolved as its position on Aileen.
Christina Ricci plays her without any attempt to be likeable, which is the correct decision and was faulted at the time. Selby is selfish in the way a young person with no money and no options is selfish, and the film does not soften a single moment of it.
The First Killing
The first man attacks her in a car, violently, and the film shows it at length. What follows is self-defense by any reading, and the film presents it as such without any ambiguity at all.
That decision is the whole film. Having established that the first was defensive, the picture then has to handle six more that were not, and it does not go back and reframe the first to make the others easier.
The second is the one that matters. A man who has done nothing, in a car, and the sequence is long, and Aileen talks continuously through it in a way that is clearly her arguing with herself.
By the fifth the film has stopped providing any context at all. The killings become shorter, flatter and less explained as they accumulate, which is the opposite of the escalation a thriller would build.
An initial justified act followed by unjustified ones is far harder to write than a pattern of either. The reader has been given permission once and has to decide when it expires. Do not go back and retroactively complicate the first. Letting it stand as genuinely defensible is what makes the rest a question.
Shorten the depiction as the acts accumulate. A film that gave the seventh the same weight as the second would be building a rhythm, and removing the weight is how you show the person has.
Let the character argue with herself out loud. Interior conflict that surfaces as talking is more legible than any amount of narration.
Florida
The film is set in a specific economic landscape and it is one of the very few American films that looks at it directly.
Highway motels, gas stations, roadside bars, a beach town in winter, and the particular kind of empty that happens where an economy used to be. The people in it are working, mostly, at things that do not pay.
The employment sequence is the best material outside the relationship. Aileen tries to get an ordinary job, has no address, no references, no work history and a criminal record, and is turned down repeatedly by people who are not being cruel. The film understands that the door being closed politely is worse than being refused rudely.
Bruce Dern appears as a veteran who is kind to her and is the one person in the film with no agenda. He is on screen for perhaps eight minutes and the character exists to demonstrate that kindness was available and was not enough.
The skating rink is the scene the film is built around. Aileen and Selby on rented skates under colored lights, a song playing, both of them briefly happy, and it is placed early enough that everything afterward is measured against it.
What It Refuses
There is no scene where anybody explains Aileen Wuornos. No psychiatrist, no childhood flashback sequence, no diagnosis and no statement about what produced her.
Information about her history arrives the way it would in life, which is in fragments, during arguments, told by somebody who has reasons to shape it. The audience assembles a picture and is never given a verified one. Patty Jenkins has said she read a great deal of the correspondence and interviews, and the film’s refusal to explain is a decision instead of a gap.
The ending is a courtroom and it is played without any of the conventions. The betrayal is delivered on a telephone, quietly, over several minutes, and the last thing the film does is a title card with dates on it.
What the picture will not do is either of the available comforts. It does not argue that she was a victim who could not help it, and it does not argue that she was simply a killer. It presents a person who was never once safe and who did these things.
Refusing to explain a character is only available if you have shown enough for the reader to attempt it themselves. Withholding without material is a blank. Deliver the history in fragments, through an unreliable speaker, during scenes about something else.
Two comforts are always on offer with a subject like this, which are exculpation and condemnation. Both let the reader put the book down, and declining both is the whole difficulty.
An ending with dates on a card is a way of handing the reader back to the record. Use it when the record is the point and not when it is a shortcut.
Should you watch Monster?
Yes, and go in expecting a love story about poverty instead of a true crime film. The transformation is the least interesting thing in a performance that is the best anybody has given in this category, and the film refuses every explanation it could have offered.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists