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Love
kills: (l-r) Ricci and Theron in Monster.
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Not
a Pretty Picture
By
Shawn Stone
Monster
Directed
by Patty Jenkins
The “sexy serial killer” genre has been one of the creepier
film developments of the last dozen years. Thanks primarily
to The Silence of the Lambs and its spinoffs, vicious
sociopathic killers have become the darlings of millions.
And, well, it’s kind of disgusting.
Aileen “Lee” Wuornos (Charlize Theron) isn’t a well-spoken,
Dante-reading, Bach- listening super-genius carving up assorted
innocents for supper (and our amusement). In Monster,
this real-life serial killer is a societal castoff: an abused
and abandoned child grown into a battered, exploited adult.
She’s a prostitute, but there’s nothing sexy about her. Treated,
literally, as human garbage, she eventually turns on the world
with shocking fury.
Writer and director Patty Jenkins sketches Lee’s life with
heartbreaking deftness. With Theron’s voice-over on the soundtrack,
images flash by of a beautiful-but-bruised little girl, and
then a poverty-stricken (and socially scorned) teen turning
tricks when she should be in school. When Jenkins shows the
adult Lee at work on the highways of Florida, and the clueless,
self-absorbed men who buy her services for 10 or 20 dollars,
the anger and despair are palpable.
Lee turns a corner when she meets Selby (Christina Ricci),
a lonely young woman trying to come to terms with being gay.
(Selby has been exiled from her Ohio home to a relative’s
house in Florida for trying to kiss a girl—in church.) The
two hit it off and, though Lee professes not to be gay, fall
in love. Lee decides to quit hooking and go straight.
Things fall apart quickly, however, as Lee has no education
or skills, and Selby is selfish and lazy. A horrific encounter
with one of Lee’s johns ends in murder. Murder, it turns out,
is something, finally, that she has a talent for.
This kind of film is, ultimately, only as effective as its
lead performance. If we don’t buy Theron, everything falls
apart. Which is why the first part of Monster is, despite
Jenkins’ deft storytelling, a mess. Theron has always been,
at best, an adequate actress. Her most recent film, The
Italian Job, was entertaining in spite of her and
the other lead, Mark Wahlberg; they were dull, and the picture
was saved by the skilled supporting cast.
Gaining weight and making herself “ugly” doesn’t magically
transform Theron into Meryl Streep, or even Uma Thurman: She
plays the character as a twitching, barely watchable wreck,
externalizing emotional pain with a grotesque overplaying
particular to Method acting. Theron’s obvious commitment eventually
begins to work, however. Once Lee starts killing her customers—and
becomes more secure in her relationship with Selby—Theron
tones down the mannerisms. Through sheer doggedness, she grows
more convincing as Lee becomes more monstrous.
Alas, the trajectory of Ricci’s performance as Selby is exactly
the opposite. Beguiling and wounded in the beginning, Ricci
grows less and less believable. It’s clear that Selby, without
acknowledging it, knows how Lee is acquiring money and cars;
Ricci never displays the nuances of self-delusion, duplicity
and selfishness central to Selby’s personality.
If Monster is an indictment of society’s inability
to help abused and abandoned women and children, it also challenges
the popular notion of what a serial killer is: an inhuman
fiend, a modern substitute for vampires and werewolves. (That’s
what makes “monster” such a satisfying title.) Lee kills men
partially as revenge for every horrible thing men have done
to her, but also because she discovers—to her surprise—that
it’s a more efficient and lucrative way to make money than
hooking. In this, Monster has more in common with Charlie
Chaplin’s Bluebeard comedy Monsieur Verdoux than Hannibal.
If the film does nothing more than deglamorize the genre,
it has accomplished something worthwhile.
On
Speed
Torque
Directed
by Joseph Kahn
Starring the rocket-fueled motorcycles known as “crotch rockets,”
Torque is another speed-demon movie produced by Neil
H. Moritz, who has created his own genre of mindless, indirect-to-video-game
cinema. Although Torque eats the dust of Moritz’s The
Fast and the Furious, it’s better than that film’s posing
sequel. And it at least has a sense of humor along with its
extreme attitude. Parroting Vin Diesel’s silliest line, Ford
(The Ring’s Martin Henderson) tells his former girlfriend,
Shane (Monet Mazur), “I live my life a quarter of a mile at
a time,” to which she replies, “That’s the stupidest thing
I’ve ever heard.” Actually, it’s not, considering the rest
of the film’s dialogue. No wonder Ford is having a hard time
getting her back in the saddle.
Complicating his cave-man courtship is the fact that he’s
been set up by Henry (Matt Schulze), a drug dealer in Biker
Town, where it’s always spring break. Henry is perhaps jealous
of Ford for his resemblance to a Tom Cruise-Kurt Russell genetic
hybrid, and that’s why he stashed his crystal meth in some
bikes in Shane’s body shop. Anyway, the FBI is on Ford’s tail,
and oh yeah, Ford is also under suspicion of having murdered
the little brother of a nasty bike-gang leader, Trey (Ice
Cube, whose entire performance consists of nostril-pinching
sneers).
Once the cranking plot has been set in motion, the film shifts
into gear with the idiotically reckless racing scenes that
are its raison d’être. And some of them are pretty good, as
long as you don’t pay attention to things like gravity, time
and space. There’s a wheelie ballet with a speeding train,
and a gang melee through a grove of palm trees that at least
gets points for originality of backdrop. The man with his
hand on the joystick, Joseph Kahn, is a top-tier music-video
director, and he certainly knows how to throw together a flashy
chase sequence, even if it requires ludicrous amounts of splicing
and stunt mechanics. For the climactic warp-speed road race,
he dispenses with movie logic altogether and shifts into gaming-style
computer animation. This bit is either awesome or laughable,
depending on whether the viewer is under or over 11 years
old.
Adam Scott (Party of Five) as the terminally hip FBI
geek is kinda fun, and so are the crayon-colored leathers
worn by all the bikers (except the requisite Goth-chick cycle
slut). Other than that, there’s no reason not to pass on the
film in favor of Torque, the video game, where at least the
viewer will be able to dispense with the moronic macho posturing
and cut straight to the animated chase.
—Ann
Morrow
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