The monster in writer-director Patty Jenkins' "Monster" is Aileen "Lee" Wuornos, a prostitute who murdered seven Florida men during a nine-month period in 1989-1990.
Wuornos was eventually executed in the Sunshine State for her crimes, but a quick search on the Web demonstrates that throughout her 12 years on Death Row and beyond she has been a subject of interest for playwrights, television dramatists and several filmmakers. Controversial British documentarist Nick Broomfield ("Kurt and Courtney") alone has made two features about her. The latter, "Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer," has not yet opened in Seattle but sounds fascinating, including final interviews with the condemned woman and footage of Broomfield's role as a defense witness during Wuornos' final appeal.
Florida governor Jeb Bush, an unwavering death-penalty proponent, might not agree, but something about Wuornos' horrifying roots as an abused child and shocking crime spree as a vengeful hooker elicits sympathy and reflection among select storytellers. Jenkins and her cast - especially Charlize Theron, a reliable and typically radiant actress ("The Cider House Rules," "The Italian Job") who defies expectations in a bravura performance as the frayed Wuornos - take on the unenviable task of building a context in which the subject's agonies, misdeeds and contradictions can be understood. Not defended, but made explicit - much like, well, some of the short, unhappy lives of the cinema's most tragic monsters, including Dr. Frankenstein's rejected creation or Lon Chaney's hideous taskmaster in "Phantom of the Opera."
While the effect may be more understated and "Monster"'s framework more socially incisive than fantastic, Jenkins and Theron (who also co-produced) clearly see their version of Wuornos in a film tradition that includes those piteous miscreants played under heavy disguise by Chaney and Boris Karloff. Carrying extra poundage and unrecognizable with dental prosthetics, mottled skin and unkempt locks, Theron taps into the same compelling tension of other movie ghouls: her character exists underground and is virtually invisible to all but a few in the story, yet she becomes freakishly larger-than-life to the audience.
Still, there's a difference between Wuornos and the classic monsters: there's not a lot of mystery about her creation and motivation. Despite scant and scattered, yet knowing, references to Wuornos' hideous upbringing, her reinvention from victim to murderer of would-be johns is easy to explicate. For one thing, she's an instinctive if occasionally suicidal survivor and has grown fed up with degradation, rape and beatings while hustling along highways. But the change is also tied to Wuornos' new and unexpected love affair with a young lesbian, Selby (Christina Ricci), giving her more of a reason to live, even thrive, than she has perhaps ever known.
As Jenkins tells it, the nesting impulse that caused teenage Aileen to turn tricks in order to feed her siblings returns as full-on, working-class industriousness in order to provide for Selby. It's just that Aileen's job, so to speak, becomes robbing and killing her customers before they can perpetrate violence against her. "Monster"'s most interesting section, unlike most films, is its middle, when Wuornos' fortunes substantially if briefly improve and she begins dreaming bigger dreams while railing, like any Jo Six-Pack, against budget-busting bad luck and an unappreciative spouse at home.
In such scenes, that aforementioned tension between the Aileen relative to other characters and the Aileen relative to us encourages the audience to view her, at least part of the time, with Brechtian detachment. The experience is exciting and rewarding. Like Welles' Charles Foster Kane, the mystery of what Wuornos lost is less profound than what she does because of what she lost.
Building castles both to trap love and shut out the unresolvable old hurt, Wuornos, again like Kane, briefly exists in relief from a literal account of her story. At times, Jenkins even has Theron nostalgically recite, in voiceover, old platitudes from what must have been Aileen's school days: simple, naïve touchstones for getting by in the world, crystalline wisdom belied by simultaneous images of exploitation and abuse. Yes, the irony is screaming, but Jenkins inspires some faith in her gamble. The payoff - as with a scene in which Wuornos not only spares the life of a clueless, middle-aged virgin (Pruitt Taylor Vince) but provides him charitable relief, like a therapist reluctantly stuck with an emergency client - is in our privileged glimpses of Wuornos' evaporating humanity.
Trouble is, "Monster"'s heart is divided between the experimental and the banal. The other half of the film is bathetic, Lifetime Channel drivel, unmemorable stretches of tearful dialogue through which Wuornos blurts what we've already subtly gleaned from the action. Jenkins pours it on, thrilled with the sound of her Aileen's voice, convinced that economy is a wrong strategy for Theron's big break-against-type as a toothy, lonely, broken-down anti-heroine. In an unbearable (for the wrong reasons) sequence in which an end-of-the-road Wuornos and Ricci's ambiguous gamine, Selby, must say goodbye at a bus stop, it's hard not to see inspiration for an all-female parody of "Midnight Cowboy."
As these things go, the more overbearing the raw honesty, the more elusive the point to it all. A little more discipline, and Jenkins might have had a great American film on her hands. We'll have to settle for "Monster"'s not-inconsiderable indications of greatness, however, and hope the talented Jenkins finds sturdier footing on her next project.
Tom Keogh is a freelance writer in the greater Seattle area.[[In-content Ad]]
