Monster: Movie & DVD Review

(Originally published 2003)

You know the old adage--Hollywood loves a pretty face. But lately, when it comes to winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, those faces--some among the most celebrated in the world--have been transformed into something less photogenic than we've come to expect.

Take, for instance, three of the last four winners for Best Actress.

Last year, Nicole Kidman blunted her profile with a prosthetic nose to become Virginia Woolf in "The Hours." A year earlier, Halle Berry nixed any trace of makeup to bare her soul in "Monster's Ball." Two years before that, Hilary Swank sported a bowl cut to convincingly pass herself off as a young man in "Boys Don't Cry."

Without the trappings of beauty to hold them back, all of these actresses found the freedom to create something startling and real. As such, they did some of the best work of their careers, and took home the Academy Award.

If the trend continues, Charlize Theron, the South African bombshell who heretofore hasn't successfully carried a movie on her own but who has smashingly succeeded in doing just that in Patty Jenkins' "Monster," is a lock on this year's award. The actress has found herself the role of a lifetime.

In the movie, Theron plays real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed seven men before being captured, convicted and sent to death row in 1992, where she was electrocuted 10 years later.

At first a romance, the movie dissolves into a horror show as Jenkins chronicles Wuornos' chaotic, dysfunctional relationship with Selby Wall (Christina Ricci)--a fictionalized version of Wuornos' real-life, 18-year-old lover, Tyria Moore.

"Monster" isn't an apologia for Wuornos' crimes, but Jenkins does attempt to understand them with a measure of empathy, particularly since they stem from an act of self-defense, when Wuornos was raped by one of her tricks. The movie is an uneasy roadmap of her violent undoing, a portrait of a woman with no moral center who chose murder as a way to steal money and thus, in her mind, stay in love.

Theron's beauty has been used by Hollywood far more often than her talent, but here, she has fully, defiantly transformed herself, greasing back her hair, dying it dishwater blond, shaving off her eyebrows, yellowing her teeth, pitting her skin, gaining 30 pounds and, in the process, delivering the best performance of 2003.

As Wuornos, she is as remarkable as she is unrecognizable, but it would be a mistake to assume for a minute that her performance--like Kidman, Berry and Swank's--is only the result of physical transformation. It's performance as art--so powerful, calibrated and raw, it's difficult to shake the pain, vulnerability and ultimately the rage Theron expresses onscreen.

She's fantastic here, never better, and her performance--wild, loose and unexpected, with the screen barely able to contain her--is something to behold.

Grade: A

(Note: Theron won the award.)