Opportunity lost
Monster
dir. Patty Jenkins.
Aileen Wuornos, like many other women who have murdered, has now been inflated into myth. In an Academy Award-accelerated process, the much abused prostitute who killed men on Florida’s desolate motorways and who was executed by lethal injection in 2002, has been anatomised and dramatised. But the woman herself seems to have given us the slip.
Watching Jenkins’ sympathetic version of Wuornos in Monster, I kept thinking that maybe Shakespeare’s King Duncan was right about Macbeth: there is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Certainly, much art was expended to give actor (‘the beautiful’, ‘the brave’) Charlize Theron the face and body of Aileen Wuornos. Yes, the makeup job (by Tony G) was spectacular. Yes, Theron bulked up for the role. Yes, her acting is arresting: she struts and swears like a cowboy, and she has range (surely a legitimate expectation from an actor, even a beautiful one?). But she has no mystery. By film’s end I still had no clearer sense of Wuornos herself, or why she did what she did. A problem, perhaps, of quasi-documentary filmmaking: the audience will have expectations that a feature film, with its narrative imperative, can’t meet. And there is the further, perennial problem of the dramatisation of evil. Film can do violence—easy. But evil needs a script, and a director, and actor, of something like genius.
Director Patty Jenkins, who wrote the script as well as directing, is modest in her claims. ‘Based on a true story’ the credits declare. Jenkins quite deliberately limits her focus to a particular episode in Wuornos’ life, a time when she met and fell in love with a young woman, Selby Wall (Christina Ricci), who had been sent south by her father, to ‘cure’ her of homosexuality. Jenkins’ script does justice to the neediness of both women, and to Selby’s sad, banal betrayal of Wuornos. Jenkins is also restrained—and thus more disturbing—in her treatment of the killings. And, in intermittent dialogue, she provides a sketch of extenuating cause and effect. The ‘monster’ out there on the motorway is a monster of tabloid creation. Her Wuornos is a tall scrag of a woman, crouched in profile, alone on a steep verge above the relentless Florida traffic.
Yet she killed, over and over. The film only begins to penetrate the horror of that fact—and its psychology.
Oddly, the mute face of onetime US Secretary of