By Tricia Olszewski
There's a lot of ugliness in Monster, and despite the publicity about extra pounds and prosthetics, it's not all courtesy of Charlize Theron. Theron is indeed unrecognizable in her lead role as Aileen Wuornos, the prostitute-turned-serial-killer who was convicted of the late-'80s murders of six johns and executed in a Florida prison in 2002. But this unsettling biopic, the debut of writer-director Patty Jenkins, manages to transcend the usually distracting beauty-goes-beast trick and keep the focus on a life gone south.
Jenkins swaddles Wuornos' crimes in a love story that's as cringe-inducing as it is tender. Monster begins on the night Aileen, soaked from the rain and looking half past dead, ambles into a Daytona Beach gay bar under the ruse that her truck broke down. She catches the eye of a desperately lonely young woman named Selby (Christina Ricci). Selby is an Ohio transplant, sent to Florida by her father in the hope that her hyper-religious aunt and uncle will "cure" her of lesbianism. Many pitchers and shots later, Selby invites the obviously homeless Aileen to platonically spend the night with her, and their wrecked trains are irrevocably hitched.
From Aileen's opening voice-over about how she "always wanted to be in the movies" and was a "real romantic" to her passionate insistence that she can take care of Selby, Jenkins attempts to humanize the murderer without making excuses: Aileen's abusive upbringing doesn't get revealed until film's end, and for every violent episode that seems justified (Aileen's first victim brutally raped her), there are others that are clearly the reaction of someone who's at least paranoid, perhaps psychotic. Aileen, though often well-intentioned in her desire to straighten up and settle down, is shown to occasionally lose touch with reality, promising to buy Selby beach houses with $40 she earned with a couple of blowjobs, musing that her next job might be as a veterinarian. Though Aileen's guilt is a foregone conclusion, audience sympathy vacillates with every scene. The murders, in Aileen's mind, are purely a matter of circumstance: After she unsuccessfully tries to begin a new career, she reasons that killing men for their money and cars is the only way she and Selby can survive. A fender bender with a victim's car and Selby's disillusionment with the relationship lead to Aileen's eventual capture.
Ricci and Theron both succeed in making their characters mesmerizingly repugnant. Ricci's bug-eyed neediness—a carryover from her role in Woody Allen's Anything Else—as the pitiable, mulleted Selby suggests none of her trademark brattiness. And Theron's physicality is a marvel: She throws her extra 30 pounds into a perfect redneck swagger, carrying herself with a head-cocking stiffness that discloses both arrogance and insecurity. Her freckled, jowly, nearly eyebrowless face does take a few minutes to get used to, and at times her tweakiness—Theron's head is always moving—seems a touch overboard. But Theron generally tempers the bodily bravado, leaving only deep loathsomeness.
Even Monster's minor characters are unlikable, from Selby's harping, narrow-minded aunt (a highly effective Annie Corley) to Aileen's women-hating johns. The only laugh in the movie is unintentional—Aileen and Selby's first kiss, in a roller-skating rink, is choreographed to the increasing tempo of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." Unjustified belief, both Selby's in Aileen and Aileen's in herself, is in fact the only hint of light in this dour affair, but it's just enough to cast upon Monster a captivating shadow of doubt.