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In January 1991, aging prostitute Aileen Wuornos was arrested in Florida. She was suspected of killing seven men since 1989, leaving their bullet-riddled bodies near highways, and stealing their cars and cash. In January 1992, Wuornos was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, mostly on the evidence of her own confessions and the testimony of her lesbian lover during the killing spree, Tyria Moore. In October 2002, the state took her life. MONSTER is Aileen's story.
Even a cursory reading of the Wuornos tragedy on the Web will indicate the challenge of Charlize's incredibly taxing role. It's not just the make-up (shaved eyebrows, false teeth), body alteration (thirty pounds added weight), and costumes that the actress put on for the role. It's the walk, talk, nervous mannerisms and body language. Even aura, if you believe in such. Theron is unrecognizable as herself. The transformation is apocalyptically stunning.
The film does, of course, take liberties. Tyria Moore, 24-years old when she met Wuornos in 1986, becomes "Selby" (Christina Ricci), who's about 18 in the script. The screenplay inferred to me a time span of perhaps several months for the Aileen-Selby relationship, and that the first killing occurred about when the two first met. In fact, Aileen and Tyria spent four years together, and the first murder was committed only towards the end. In any case, Ricci deserves consideration for an Oscar in a supporting role as the troubled, naive, and clueless Selby totally out of her depth.
At one point, Theron's Aileen states that she was raped by her father's friends, and that he subsequently beat her for it. In fact, Aileen's real-life mother divorced Leo Dale Pittman a couple months before her daughter's birth and Aileen never met her natural father. Aileen and a brother were subsequently raised by their maternal grandparents, Lauri and Britta Wuornos. The grandfather drank heavily and was physically abusive. Aileen engaged in pre-marital sex at an early age, and was pregnant at 14. After giving her child up for adoption, she ran away from home to take up hitchhiking and prostitution. While MONSTER doesn't excuse Aileen for her the murders she later committed, it reveals Wuornos for the emotionally and psychologically tortured casualty of life that she was and who, in the end, "volunteered" for the death penalty. In this case, execution may have been a mercy.
MONSTER gives evil a human face, a fact that will undoubtedly cause discomfiture in some critics who believe in a morally black and white world.
MONSTER isn't an easy presentation to watch. As the film unwound and the power of Theron's performance washed over me in waves, I found myself sliding lower and lower into my seat. The rape scene that sets Aileen on her murderous path is vicious. And it doesn't get any easier with the individual killings, especially the last when any vestige of sympathy the audience might have for Wuornos is forfeit.
Picking up the story of Aileen as she is at one of her lowest points, hitching across the country and turning tricks in order to survive, the film gives Charlize Theron the role of a lifetime as the dangerous yet surprisingly sympathetic main character. Cast against type (rather like Tom Cruise in Born On The Fourth Of July), Theron is virtually unrecognizable under heavy makeup, extra weight and prosthetic teeth as she virtually inhabits the role of Wournos, turning in a performance that must rank as one of the finest in modern cinema.
Wournos abandons her lifestyle after she meets Selby Wall, a teenage lesbian runaway played with a wide eyed innocence by Christina Ricci, and although Wournos insists she is not gay, the two quickly fall in love. Determined to do things right for Selby, Aileen attempts to get a regular job, but after a string of humiliating failures, she returns to her former job, where she kills her first victim in self defence after her beats, rapes and is about to kill her. From there, it is an easy step for Aileen to continue killing her "Johns", taking their money and their cars as she attempts to give Selby the lifestyle that she so desperately craves.
This is in no way, shape or form a happy uplifting film. Aileen is as much a victim as any of the men she kills, but the film does not attempt to excuse her actions, rather to rationalise and explain them. The film takes certain liberties with the facts in order to raise the dramatic tension (for instance the time line of the murders is compressed, certain facts that Aileen states about her childhood are not contextualised, and the teenage Selby Wall character was in reality the 24 year old Tyria Moore), but so what, it does not detract from the film, nor does it make the overall presentation any less accurate.
Monster is not any easy film to watch. The violence, when it does come is both graphic and sad, the two main characters are destined for nothing but heartache, and Aileen herself, whilst giving evil a human face, is a sad, flawed victim of the society that raised her. This is a film that refuses to be black and white about its portrayal of right and wrong.
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