As far as I can see, the main competitors for this year’s best-actress Oscar are Charlize Theron and Diane Keaton. The latter may get it for sentimental reasons — that is, an older woman, beloved by Hollywood but in the autumn of her career, taking a romantic lead in what has been a big hit in the United States (Something’s Gotta Give).
Onse Charlize, however, could well snatch it from Keaton. Theron’s performance in Monster, Patty Jenkins’s film about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, has already been much-garlanded — Theron got a Screen Actors’ Guild Award, several critics’ circle prizes, and a Golden Globe. Theron’s is certainly a striking performance. It is also the kind of thing the Oscars love to reward: glamour queen goes ugly, which is deemed to be an example of great self-sacrifice in the name of art. For heaven’s sake, she even put on weight for the role! Now that’s acting.
But Theron does better than that. For the first 20 minutes or so of Monster, one is transfixed by her changed face. One virtually squints to try and see the pouting blonde starlet under the puffy, sunburned and often dirty visage of the trailer-trash killer. Then, after a bit, one forgets about the actress and all the hard work she’s doing and gets pulled into this gritty, gripping story of a very unfortunate woman.
We see Wuornos largely through her relationship with Selby (Christina Ricci), a younger, more bourgeois woman who falls in love with her — or at least develops some kind of mutual emotional dependency. The movie starts on the day of their meeting, and constantly refers us back to the relationship between the two, which becomes a measure of whether Wuornos is going to be able to achieve the relative normality and safety she craves.
In that respect, Monster is a lesbian love story, and a rather touching one. Some may be disturbed by the fact that this romance is happening between two such unappealing characters. No one is going to set Wuornos up as one of those “positive role models” gay and lesbian people are said to require, any more than they could have made a saint of Jeffrey Dahmer. But part of what Monster does, interestingly, is give us this relationship as representative of Wuornos’s good side, as it were — it may be the best part of her.
Jenkins lets the background to Wuornos’s present state of destitution emerge slowly. From the start of the film, the viewer wants to know how she got like this, and gradually, in a hinting way, Jenkins tells us. But there’s no big speech pleading for clemency on the grounds of extenuating circumstances, no obvious argument for sympathy on the grounds of her tortured past. It was wise to skim over Wuornos’s trial and stop short of her subsequent death-row conversion to reborn Christianity.
The approach, in fact, is remarkably reserved, without overt manipulation. Our sympathies for Wuornos are allowed to fluctuate. Her first killing, of a man who rapes her in a scene that is very hard to watch, has us on her side — one almost wants to cheer when she blows the guy away. But as her murder spree continues, that sympathy dissipates, even while we still hope she can stop before it’s too late, and that her amour fou with Selby will in fact be the road to sanity.
This kind of ambivalence is all too rare in the movies, dominated as they are by Hollywood moral schemata that make the Vatican’s pronouncements on gay sex and woman priests look delicately nuanced by comparison. There is not, perhaps, enough in the script of Monster detailing Selby’s psychological workings — it’s hard to understand what she sees in Wuornos (and Ricci is, too, maybe a little too Addams Family). But that gap doesn’t detract from a fine, hard-edged little movie, the core of which is Theron’s riveting performance.
I say give the Oscar to Charlize.