Watching Charlize Theron as ser-ial killer Aileen Wuornos in writer-director Patty Jenkins’s drama, Monster, one finds oneself asking: How the hell did they make such a beautiful young woman so ugly? One has to remind oneself that the woman before us, with her weatherbeaten face and skid-row pallor, will next be seen in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers playing a young Britt Ekland.
The extinguishing of Theron’s beauty to produce a remarkable fac-simile of a beaten-down freeway hooker must have kept squadrons of makeup artists busy and required lengthy sessions in the Ugly Chair.
This approach works, though: Theron vanishes before our eyes to become a woman beaten down to nothing by a life of rape, incest, teenage pregnancy and decades of homelessness and prostitution.
For all Monster‘s flaws, Theron’s performance can’t be faulted. It is richly detailed and upsetting, and manages to retain the audience’s sympathy despite the gruesome killings: Wuornos killed seven men who picked her up along a stretch of Florida’s I-95 freeway.
Perhaps an extra layer of conviction and horror is added by the knowledge that Theron’s mother killed her drunken and abusive father in self-defence when the actress was only 15, a killing for which she was rightly not prosecuted.
Monster covers a relatively short period in Wuornos’s life, from the day she meets the young gay woman who would later betray her to the FBI (fictionalised here as ”Selby” and played by Christina Ricci) until the day she is sentenced to die by lethal injection.
Wuornos was at the time nearing the end of a lifelong downward spiral that dated back to being abandoned by her mother, her father’s incarceration for raping a young boy (he later killed himself in prison), her rape by her grandfather and a career in prostitution that started when she was nine and traded blow jobs for cigarettes.
In the years since she had drifted across the United Sates, finally settling in south Florida, where she frequented the bleakest way stations of the white Southern underclass: freeways, sleazy biker bars, roach motels, jailhouses and the wooded back roads where she serviced — and later murdered — the suburban dads and roving truckers who were her clients.
Much of this background information isn’t covered by Monster, which, for purposes of narrative sleekness, confines itself to a few short flashbacks to childhood and rather simplistically presents Wuornos as a cornered beast striking out in wild-eyed yet understandable vengeance at a world — and especially its men — that had long scorned and violated her.
I gleaned most of the background from another movie, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill’s second documentary about Wuornos, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, a follow-up to their 1992 exposé, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer.
The Selling of a Serial Killer was a remarkable movie in the now-celebrated Broomfield-Churchill style: loosely constructed in narrative terms, but tight in its polemics, featuring the languidly handsome and posh-voiced Broomfield extracting stunning admissions and awkward contradictions from his subjects and bamboozling them with his amiably dazed and boyish manner.
The gallery of grotesques was remarkable even for Broomfield and Churchill. It included Wuornos’s attorney Steve Glazer, or ”Dr Legal”, described by Broomfield in the new movie as ”an old hippie out of his depth”, who seemed more concerned with promoting his own music and securing hefty interview fees than with defending his client (word of advice: if Broomfield gives you money to talk, make sure his camera’s off when you greedily count it). Indeed, Glazer counselled Wuornos to plead guilty after Churchill filmed him smoking seven joints en route to the sentencing hearing.
Also on show were the crazed, born-again women who adopted Wuornos then sold her out and various equally weird and marginal figures in Wuornos’s already weird and marginal life.
The movie concluded with the arrest of several police officers, who had stained their reputations by negotiating with movie companies for the rights to aspects of Wuornos’s story. Watching Monster, one wonders if any of those movie companies are still in the picture.
This isn’t the first time Broomfield and Churchill have returned to a subject. An extremely powerful and upsetting early film, Juvenile Liaison, which tracked child-services officers and their brutalised young charges in the mid-1970s, was suppressed by the BBC, though parts of it were shown 15 years later when the filmmakers followed up what had happened to the kids.
Aileen: Life and Death arose from a more intimate involvement with their subject. Broomfield was called as a witness in Wuornos’s final appeal against the death penalty and decided to film the process.
During the hearings, all the witnesses — including Dr Legal, who greets Broomfield with a weary yet friendly ”fuck you, man” — were housed in the same motel in Ocala, Florida.
It is evident that Governor Jeb Bush, then seeking re-election, was eager to see Wuornos despatched into the hereafter with as little fuss and as much publicity as possible.
The injection was scheduled for October 2002, just in time for the polls a month later.
Wuornos was eager, as she put it, ”to die in Christ”, and had admitted that she had killed ”in cold blood”.
She also withdrew a claim that her first victim had beaten and bound her, raped her with a tyre iron and poured alcohol into her wounds and private parts before she shot him dead.
Wuornos was enraged and wildly contradictory, so it is hard to tell if her detailed account of this incident, or its withdrawal, are true.
Yet it is highly disturbing and quite damaging to Monster‘s legitimacy to see it re-enacted as she originally described it.
In the end, Broomfield and Churchill’s search for truth inevitably trumps Jenkins’s fictionalisation.
Even Theron’s remarkable acting — a performance that lacks a frame worthy of holding it — is superseded by Broomfield’s interview with Wuornos on the eve of her execution.
She had been pronounced sane by psychiatrists who examined her for just 15 minutes.
But the woman who appears before Broomfield’s camera is deranged, paranoid and possibly schizophrenic, raging at the 10 or more guards around her, at the criminal justice system, at her mother, grandfather, Jeb Bush and, finally, at Broomfield himself.
With her pupils dilated to blackness, and spitting vituperation in all directions, the very last thing she seems is sane. No acting can compete with such reality. — Â