Preview
MONSTER
Starring Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci and Bruce Dern
Written and directed by Patty Jenkins
Opens Friday, January 23
Globe Cinema
Based on a true story.
When those five, seemingly innocuous words flash across the screen at the beginning of a movie, they frequently present at least two dangers. One is that the story’s basis in truth – the bare facts – will be used to justify a great many shortcomings with respect to its telling. On the other hand, the fictionalization of the story may allow a great many embellishments to be received as fact, especially if those embellishments lead us to a deeper truth than the facts might on their own.
When the story in question is that of Aileen Wuornos – the Florida prostitute who famously murdered seven men from 1989 to 1990 and was executed for the killings in 2002 – these dangers are perhaps more worrisome than ever. Wuornos has already been the subject of documentaries, books, a TV movie and an opera, some of them more sensationalized than others. She’s been variously portrayed as a man-hating, lesbian murderer, a cold-blooded serial killer and a vengeful victim of sexual abuses suffered throughout her childhood and adult life.
So when writer-director Patty Jenkins set out to make Monster, a fictional biopic about Wuornos, she had to sort through a great deal of conflicting information. In the end, Jenkins decided to toss out the clichés and illuminate part of Wuornos’s life that few before her had ever considered very deeply. She decided to make a love story.
"This period of her life has never really been displayed very well," says Jenkins. "More than anything, I wanted to bring the other half of the information. The documentaries are great, but they’re about the aftermath more and her childhood more, not about the relationship in this period of time that the murders happened…. I never had an agenda to make people feel sympathetic or not, although I did see in the news, in 1990 when it broke, a really, really rich story."
The relationship in question developed between Wuornos and Tyria Moore, a young lesbian woman struggling to reconcile her sexuality with her strict Christian upbringing. Changing only a few details (including Moore’s name, which becomes "Selby Wall" in the film), Jenkins focuses on this romantic relationship to such an extent that Monster fits easily into the film noir subgenre of lovers-on-the-run movies. Indeed, the frenzied desperation and anxiety of the two lovers is at times reminiscent of that in noir classics such as Gun Crazy (1949), In Cold Blood (1967) or Badlands (1973).
Still, none of those movies idealized lesbian love as a salvation from a brutally misogynist world. In a sense, this is Monster’s boldest manoeuvre, as Aileen (Charlize Theron) and Selby (Christina Ricci) can be seen as a pair of butch-and-femme fatales, each taking solace in the other’s compassion. When they share their first kiss at a roller-rink, with Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’" swelling on the soundtrack, it is surely one of the most tender and romantic portrayals of homosexual love ever witnessed in mainstream cinema.
Jenkins says that it was most important to her that Monster would not dehumanize Wuornos just because she was a prostitute and a murderer.
"I think there’s a tendency from the healthy public to look at and play at (a story like this) in a way that reflects that you’re experiencing it for the first time," Jenkins says. "So, to do a hooker story and have the actor so sad and depressed and acknowledging that they’re a hooker every moment, that’s not how reality works. People that work in a factory don’t cry for themselves every day – they laugh and they shoot the shit and they have a crush on somebody. Understanding that that reality is the same, no matter where you are, was the challenge."
In order to lead her audience to understand the same, Jenkins knew that the film would have to be impeccably realistic. Of course, the image-obsessed media have already slopped buckets of attention on the fact that Theron gained approximately 30 pounds for her role and was made to look even more ordinary by makeup artist Toni G., who perfectly recreated Wuornos’s down-turned mouth and sun-damaged skin. Yet, Theron’s transformation wasn’t necessary just to support her nuanced performance, which nails Wuornos’s agitated mannerisms, slightly drawling speech patterns and, most importantly, her wounded psyche. Jenkins says it was also crucial for the film’s credibility.
"I have a pet peeve with (actors) playing damaged people (if they) don’t have any of the physical embodiments of that damage," says Jenkins. "It just drives me crazy when people are wearing extremely expensive makeup and have what I can tell is an extremely expensive haircut but they’re supposed to be playing a drug addict. It builds a wall that keeps me from getting as close to the film as I’d like to be…. Even though it’s a very subconscious observation, everybody observes it."
Still, Monster’s observable realism isn’t merely for realism’s sake – instead, it helps to create a milieu through which its audience comes to experience an emotional truth and feel empathy for a woman who has been made to represent many things, but has rarely been represented as human.
"The fact that she was trying to hang on to a romance so similar to the romance that we all had was the greatest tool that we had to emotionally pull the audience to a place where they related with Aileen Wuornos, pre-murder, for that moment, and related their own falling in love experience to hers….
"Since the beginning of time, we’ve been telling great stories and finding an arc to follow that was actually present in the reality. Her (Wuornos’s) reality was that she was hopeless and going to kill herself and at the end of this story in reality she was crying in a courtroom when her girlfriend turned against her. So I just tried to divine that story and focus on that, and then weave within that so much richer detail and social subtext that was just automatic to her tale." |
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