Neil Sonnekus
Movie of the week. More has been made of Halle Berry’s long, tearful performance at the 2002 Oscars than her acting in Monster’s Ball itself. It is not an accumulative award, like Denzel Washington’s was, insultingly. It is a deserved award for a brilliant bit of acting in an equally great film.
It is the kind of film every past local producer and commissioning editor would have said is impossible to produce, either because “people aren’t ready for it yet” or because the black role belongs on one TV channel and the white’s on another and whites aren’t that bad anyway.
Unfortunately it is also the kind of script that most local producers and commissioning editors would reject today, either because a black woman couldn’t possibly behave so shamelessly in front of a white fascist and, worse, how could he possibly have any redeeming features?
The irony, of course, is that it is not a political work, but one that starts with the reality of racial inequality in the Deep South and works its way to-wards more lasting archetypes. Like, for example, the eternal war between men and women. And the different needs of both for their opposite.
The set-up, as in most real tragedies, is simple enough. Three generations of white men have worked in correctional services at the Georgia State Penitentiary. One is dying, the other is middle aged and the youngest is “weak”. The latter two have to assist at an execution, done with sickening restraint. Nothing needs to be said for us to understand the implications of the African-American prisoner being dressed with a large, man-sized nappy.
He has taken 10 years to exhaust all legal possibilities. But the one who has taken the brunt of that decade is his wife, played by Halle Berry, who has an overweight son and no money. She is understandably sick and tired of it all.
The execution indirectly causes a tragedy in the rather sad white triangle and Billy Bob Thornton is the middle-aged warden who resigns. Obviously he and Berry’s paths are going to cross in this small town. The only questions are how, and what will transpire thereafter.
Swiss-born director Mark Forster soon gets rid of the white, liberal filmmakers’s myth that blacks react just like whites to, among many others, sorrow. In the great seduction scene Berry half slaps, half touches Thornton’s character in places that get him all aroused, but she is doing exactly what the great white Calvinist way finds so actuely embarrassing. She is being highly demonstrative, if not hysterical, about her pain.
Another point that is very clearly made is that every white racist who beds a black woman clearly despises himself more than those he claims to hate, but it’s done in a highly original way. The man who says it instead of doing it, the usually amiable Peter Boyle in the TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, has emphysema. His racism is both painfully ugly and disgustingly pathetic.
And the lapsed fascist who does sleep with her only does so because a) he first had to suffer loss himself and b) she is rather beautiful. The only one small cop-out in an otherwise flawless film is that after a night of wild sex Thornton gets up next to Berry in his perfectly white underpants.
Surely if Berry can show us the stretch marks on her breasts and tattoos on her buttocks then Thornton, who makes no secret of his and Angelina Jolie’s wild sex life, can show those who want to see what seem to be his considerable goods. The point, though, is that it is out of character for any man who has been drinking and fornicating all night long to either be in his underpants and/or have them so smoothly Omo white.
Finally, there is another myth this quiet masterpiece dispels and that is that Hollywood only produces junk. If that were so this film wouldn’t exist with four top-notch names like Berry, Thornton, Heath Ledger and Sean “Puffy” Combs. The latter two give small performances that are bigger than some actors ever give, even if Ledger’s accent once flattens out into Australian.
So, a wonderfully close-to-home kind of film, one that starts off with violence but doesn’t lead to political point-scoring or teary exhaustion. In fact, like any real tragedy and this one is ultimately about the tragedy of the ordinary it leaves you in a state of calm reflection.