Wired Mesh

Blown Away

The closer we get to opening day, the less I want to review The Passion of the Christ for the Pulse. I fear that any review I could write would be more about me than about the movie, and that I'm going to alienate people if I don't absolutely adore the film. Strange how excited I was about this movie when I first heard Gibson was making it, and how I'm just gloomily dreading it now.

Meanwhile, here's my review of Monster, the best -- and most gut-wrenching -- film I've seen in 2004. Both those designations may shift after Wednesday. Certainly the gut-wrenching part will.

Charlize Theron takes empathy to new levels in Patty Jenkins’ film

By Aaron Mesh
Published in the February 11-17 issue of the Pulse

“I am a man,” the classical poet Terence wrote; “nothing human is alien to me.” This is a fine and gracious sentiment, and for most of us it is a complete crock of crap. So many of the joys and sufferings of our fellows are completely foreign to us; we can, perhaps, talk with intellectual precision about starvation in Ethiopia or prostitution on the back roads of Florida, but only because we don’t have any instinct for the feeling of such experience, which is beyond words. So we pretend that our own experiences are universal, that the world feels as we do – and the movies we watch do their darndest to strengthen our illusions, providing us with acting icons so vague that we can project our own emotions onto the screen. When we cry in movies, usually we are empathizing with ourselves.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster will not allow us that that luxury. In telling the true story of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a central Florida prostitute who shot seven of her clients, Jenkins works with actress Charlize Theron to create a character so individual – and so foreign to most of our own backgrounds – that we can do nothing but watch as humanity becomes a little less alien. The result is a brutal sucker-punch of a movie, a record of sin and madness that takes its audience on a direct journey to the center of a ruined soul. It shook me like little I’ve seen on a screen. A full day later, I still don’t know how to write about this movie.

Most films about serial killers objectify them as demonic, leering madmen or romanticize them as Bonnie and Clyde-style vigilantes. Jenkins and Theron instead create a character with no precedent: a woman so detached from human contact that her every action is an awkward parody of common behavior. There is no easy empathy here. Wuornos’ childhood abuse is alluded to, but sparingly, and her rants against men feel false, like desperate justifications. So the first half-hour of Monster verges dangerously close to exploitation: Theron’s Wuornos is so abnormal, with her butch bravado and sudden outbursts of rage, that she seems like some circus freak on display to horrify us. But Theron reveals a strange humanity in Wuornos, a capacity for love and kindness, that while diseased and warped, is still understandable. Wuornos falls in love with a young lesbian fleeing her family (Christina Ricci), and Theron allows the fanitest stirrings of motherly affection and sudden revusion at her own life to play across Wuornos’ worn face like a brief Florida thunderstorm. These emotions are never made explicit, and Wuornos herself seems barely able to comprehend them; she can only lash out with her limited street vocabulary and a long-nosed pistol.

So as Wuornos begins her crime spree, we see a complete human being committing the worst possible acts. I don’t want to describe these scenes in too much detail: the crimes are so simultaneously incomprehensible and strangely reasonable, Jenkins’ compassion for both killer and victim so complete, that these moments should be seen without any preconceptions. Or perhaps not: there are some people who shouldn’t see this movie at all, who will be unable to endure the spiritual agony of the violence. My companion at the movie gripped my elbow during the murders, like some people do during chase scenes in thrillers, and for once I was grateful, needing the physical contact to give me some distance from the terrible agony on the screen. Jenkins’ direction gives no quarter: the only way to transcend the horror of Wuornos’ life is to walk out of the theater.

The last time I can remember experiencing the same disturbing access to sin and madness was in high school, reading Crime and Punishment. Indeed, Monster feels like a contemporary, rural update of Dostoyevsky’s novel, with the same downward trajectory of murder and distracted rationalization, but without the Russian theologian’s belief in suffering as a means of grace. The only redemption Jenkins and Theron can offer Aileen Wuornos is to present her to us whole, and ask for our acknowledgement that while she may be alien to us, she is still human.

Posted by mesh at February 24, 2004 11:56 AM | TrackBack