Soured dream
Mark Steyn
Monster 18. selected cinemas In 1943, the first musical with an 'antihero', Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, opened on Broadway. 'Although it is expertly done,' wrote Brooks Atkinson in his review for the New York Times, 'can you draw sweet water from a foul well?'
That's how I feel about Monster, a movie that would have had Atkinson running screaming for the exits after ten minutes. Charlize Theron gives an undeniably great performance as Aileen 'Lee' Wuornos, a real-life prostitute and now real-dead serial killer, executed 18 months ago in Florida. I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and
technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman, There are plenty of averagelooking women out there — gritty Brit TV drama seems to be full of them — and it's surely excessively unfair if they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again. If you thought the old my-left-foot Oscar-winning disability trait was condescending, the notion that getting a Hollywood star to dim her lustre is some sort of award-winning achievement is just plain insulting to the rest of us.
Nonetheless, from the moment we first see Miss Theron, she owns the role. The contours of Lee Wuornos's life are sketched out in a few seconds: a little girl who likes the modern-day fairytales — the happy people in nice homes she glimpses in magazines before the dark shadow of some adult presence falls across the page. She thinks she knows the way to get to that life — cue the flashback of the flashed front, as Lee shows her assets to the gawping schoolboys. Soon she's graduated to trawling for business on Florida's highways, because you never know whom you'll meet that way — it might be some real nice guy who'll do something real nice for you and get you on the road to success and happiness.
And by the time the story begins and we get a really good look at her, we understand just how soured that dream's got. Lee's hair is greasy and bleach-fried; her face is puffy, blubbery, windburnt, boozeblotched; her mouth hangs down like adolescent slacker boredom twisted by time into a permanent, unintended verdict on the wreckage of her life, an accidental external expression of a self-disgust she never quite feels inside.
And somehow the vague awareness that underneath all this is Charlize Theron only underlines the totality of Lee's failure. She's not even a good hooker. If 'circumstance' (as her only friend and fellow loser Bruce Dern puts it) consigned her to her grim course, she's not savvy enough to make it work for her. She doesn't dress foxily, she can't do the wiggly walk, she's got a big shambly body she's ill at ease with, forever shifting and adjusting herself as if she's never really comfortable. Sitting in the passenger seat next to her johns, she doesn't know how to make them feel special; she's a good-time gal who isn't that good at it, and so the times just feel crappy.
Miss Theron has been a rather bland presence in her previous work. She's an old-fashioned type of starlet — midFifties, like a good fourth sister to Doris Day, Dorothy Malone and Elisabeth Fraser in Young At Heart. She could easily play a conventional Hollywood hooker — a category in which 'gritty' means Elisabeth Shue in Leaving Las Vegas — but few of us would have thought she had a
performance like this in her. Most of it's nothing to do with the make-up — it's the nervous little tics; the defiant mannishness in the way she smokes, like a tomboy toughing it out in a roomful of stevedores; the machine-gun profanities sprayed at everyone from personnel managers to maitre d's, putting an audible kick on the 'k' of 'fkin".
What turns her from a raddled old skank face-down in the beer nuts into a serial killer is love, after a fashion. Lee meets Selby (Christina Ricci), a teenager from Ohio trembling on the brink of lesbianism and sent off by her parents to stay with some good Christian folks in Florida who'll straighten her out. Instead, she goes slow-dancing with Lee at the roller-rink and next thing you know they're shacking up in a cheap motel. Patty Jenkins, Monster's writer and director, is very good at communicating simultaneously that this romance is an illusion and that both parties for the moment believe it's the real thing. Lee wants to give Selby everything, and that means money, and that means $20 blowjobs in the cars of strangers. When one guy drives her off the road into the woods, beats her up, ties her up and commences to rape her, Lee finds the gun in the glove box and blows him away. On the grass outside, she lets out a howl of liberation.
Once, when she was at school, Slim Whitman's drummer came to give a talk and share the secrets of his success, and one word of advice stuck with Lee through the years: 'All you need is love and to believe in yourself.' She's found love, and she believes in herself, but no one else does. So, to finance a life with Selby, she figures killing her johns is more lucrative than screwing them. Only the first is a bad man. Some are a little freaky, one's a lonely virgin, one doesn't want any sex, he just wanted to give a hitch-hiker a ride. And finally Lee kills the wrong kind of guy, the kind whose death attracts attention. And the wild ride is over, Miss Theron's performance is mesmeric, but in what cause? There are no great lessons to be learned from the late Miss Wuornos. The story itself changed over the years in her own retelling: it was about self-defence; then about damage and abuse; and by the end she seemed to be saying she was just a plain old sociopath. In Miss Jenkins's film, she matches the landscape — a veneer of tatty civilisation imposed on a swamp — and, as her victims discover, it's a short hop from middle-class respectability to a hole in the woods. But the movie itself concludes with an apparent acknowledgement that sometimes there's no larger meaning to a short ugly life. In a final voiceover, Lee Wuornos reels off a long list of inspirational platitudes Slim Whitman's drummer never got around to: 'Where there's life, there's hope. .. Everything happens for a rea son ' Not here.
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