Tagline:
The first female serial killer of America.
Wide Release Date:
December 24, 2003
Directed by:
Patty Jenkins
Written by:
Patty Jenkins
Produced by:
Donald Kushner, Brad Wyman, Charlize Theron, Mark Damon, Clark Peterson
Starring:
Charlize Theron
Christina Ricci
Bruce Dern
PREGAME THOUGHTS
I have a lame claim-to-fame connection to Aileen Wuornos! She went to the same high school I did. Granted, I think she went to about seventeen high schools in four years and she likely never graduated from any of them, let alone five of them, let alone seventeen of them. But hey, a claim-to-fame is a claim-to-fame! I was also childhood friends with Olympic gold medalist figure skater Charlie White, but who gives a shit about that? We’re talking about serial killers here!
Wuornos was executed when I was a sophomore in high school, and I remember there was a lot of discussion about it floating through the hallways at the time. Our monthly high school magazine had a feature that covered her life and her imprisonment, and I found everything about it fascinating. Not fascinating enough, obviously to watch this movie when it came out. I’m fixing that now almost 20 years later, so rise up off my nuts.
THE 550(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS
Monster presents the progression of Aileen Wuoros (Charlize Theron) as she goes from suicidal prostitute to homicidal prostitute! This is 1989 in podunk Florida, so there’s a lot of shitty haircuts and people who look like they haven’t showered in months.
Aileen, or “Lee”, as she’s called throughout the film, angrily hoots and hollers in a gay bar and attracts the attention of probably barely-18 Selby Wall (Christina Ricci). They get to know each other throughout the night, bonding over, like, monster trucks and Rolling Rock or whatever. They bond, and Selby invites Lee to spend the night at her aunt’s place where she’s staying after getting kicked out of her parents’ house. They share a twin-size bed. The wall behind them looks like a high school hallway.
I bet you’ve never slept in a real twin size bed before, huh?
All this creepy infatuation leads to a roller rink outing and then some back alley smoochin’! Lee seems like a real person with real emotional range and not at all a cold sociopath. She seems to care about Selby.
HOWEVER, Lee has a plan to hit the road and get a legitimate job and she begs Selby to tag along with her to start a new life. The job hunt doesn’t go very well, and broke as fuck, she settles back into her prostitution habit. A dude tries rape her, so she kills him in self-defense. A horrified Lee confesses to Selby, who is already embarking on a structureless nightmare spearheaded by the most unstable woman in Florida. Instead of bailing, which would be way smarter since Selby has been frustrated and unhappy with Lee’s failures as a breadwinner, she continues hanging on to this loser and getting strung along.
Lee starts methodically killing and robbing her clients to maintain financial stability. She gets more unhinged as the movie goes on, justifying her actions by claiming that every single client was trying to rape her. Lee even crashes the car into a friendly, elderly couple’s lawn with Selby in the passenger seat and they have to run away. It’s pretty chaotic and stressful.
To showcase an instance of empathy, Lee takes frustrated pity and spares the life of a real sad-sack of a man who gets nervous and cries because he’s never had sex before. In another instance, a man stops by her on the highway not to take advantage of her less-than-sultry prostitution-related services, but to offer her genuine help. When he notices her gun, he tries to weasel out of the interaction completely. In an act of self-preservation, Lee feels she is left no choice but to get him out of the car and shoot him, against the bearing of what seems to be her real moral compass.
Selby starts connecting the dots on Lee’s murderer murders from the daily newspapers. After a confrontation, Selby fucks on out of her life. Later, in a biker bar, Lee is confronted by two bounty hunters. Her only friend in the world, Thomas (Bruce Dern), tries to get her to leave the bar with him. Not trusting men anymore, Lee declines. She gets arrested. Selby gives her up during a tapped call and testifies against her in Lee’s trial. Lee gets shoved off to the Pokey.
Just a little blood, right? No reason to get all traumatized about it!
TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER
TOPIC 1 — Humanization
Like all good movies dealing with unpleasant societal subject matter, morality isn’t delivered in black or white. I’ve read opinions that Charlize Theron’s performance is one of the best in all of cinema (with respect to portraying a real person), and although I haven’t REFINED MY APPRECIATION OF ACTORS AND ACTRESSES ACTING to the point where I can’t really tell the difference between great acting and so-bad-it’s-great acting, Theron’s acting is pretty good here! How’s that for taking a stance?
And yes, absolutely, the point of this narrative is to give you mixed feelings about Lee. Even at her worst, she’s never actually detached from reality or emotionally unresponsive. In fact, she’s pretty volatile in her emotions, usually flipping between panic and anger. The most heart-breaking scene was near the end when a man stopped on the road to offer help. He noticed the gun, and Lee decided there was no other choice but to kill him. You could tell that she hated that she had to do it, but she was too far-gone by then in her complete lack of trust in men that she couldn’t fathom an alternative.
Plus, her care for Selby is genuine, but that’s likely only because Selby is the only person in her life that cared for her first.
“Carnivals are fun! See? Can’t you tell I’m havin’ fun?”
TOPIC 2 — Christina Ricci’s Acting
I’ve seen opinionated mutterings around the ol’ World Wide Web that Christina Ricci’s acting was pretty poor. Roger Ebert disagreed; he considered Ricci’s performance “sublime acting in its portrayal of a bad actor”. That’s a funny, roundabout way of admitting that her acting was bad!
Personally, I side with Ebert. Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first: any acting would look subpar if you were paired up with Charlize Theron in one of her best performances in her career. That being said, I don’t have a problem with Ricci’s acting. It would be distracting if it were a problem. What I saw was a very young, naïve woman with a pile of social awkwardness and a slight shame with respect to her sexuality. She spends a lot of time trusting Lee even after it became obvious she surely shouldn’t have. Her attempts to join an already-established lesbian social circle is met with overt scorn, and she barely noticed. Her dependence on Lee, who also had no idea how to move forward with any plan, was very childlike. In short, she was pretending to be something she wasn’t: confidence and independent. And she wasn’t selling it. Selby was a bad actor, not Ricci.
You can watch the movie and decide for yourself, but I know women like Selby Wall and Ricci pretty much nailed it.
Kissin’ in the dark. That’s the stuff right there.
IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!
Aileen Wuornos, a notoriously uncooperative person, gave writer and director Patty Jenkins access to hundreds of letters she had written and received in order to gain insight into Aileen’s life.
The notorious uncooperative serial killer probably cooperated because she was imagining this movie would finally show her in the positive light she thought she deserved. You know. A movie titled “Monster“.
Charlize Theron won the Academy Award for playing Aileen Wuornos on 29th February 2004, Wuornos’ birthday.
No one was happier for Theron than Wuornos herself, smiling up to her from Hell. Also, February 29 isn’t a real day! Don’t try to pull a fast one on my like that again, IMDb.
Steve Perry, former lead singer of the band Journey, was the music consultant.
lol, why? “Hey, we need some classic rock for this ’80s-era biographical film. Better get Steve Perry on the horn to help us!” No wonder “Don’t Stop Believing”, the worst song ever, was included in this movie’s soundtrack.
Reese Witherspoon campaigned for the lead role.
“Campaigned” makes it sound like Witherspoon assembled a team, threw a ton of money at organizing travel, rallies, and advertising, and lost a vote. Good thing she has killing the planet with NFTs to fall back on these days.
Charlize Theron gained between 20 and 30 pounds and shaved her eyebrows to play Aileen Wuornos. Christina Ricci also gained 20 pounds for the role and both actresses dressed in very un-glamourous clothing.
Wouldn’t it be funny if both Theron and Ricci looked absolutely physically stunning and dressed to the nines while playing a serial killing prostitute and her trashy friend in bumfuck Florida? It’s almost as if that wouldn’t work at all! Good thing there’s this little movie quirk called “acting”.
“Let’s go, Selby! The monster truck show is right ’round the street!”
IS IT WORTH A WATCH?
Yes, absolutely. Period piece dramas always hold up well as long as the production, direction, and writing are competently executed. No pun intended. Monster does a spectacular job of humanizing a serial killer while maintaining all the moral grey areas.
And you’ll see Charlize Theron at her best, no question.
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