“MONSTER” review by Roger Ebert
originally published on January 1st, 2004
What Charlize Theron achieves in Patty Jenkins’ “Monster” isn’t a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders. She does not excuse the murders. She simply asks that we witness the woman’s final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended.
Wuornos received a lot of publicity during her arrest, trial, conviction and 2002 execution for the Florida murders of seven men who picked her up as a prostitute (although one wanted to help her, not use her). The headlines, true as always to our compulsion to treat everything as a sporting event or an entry for the Guinness Book, called her “America’s first female serial killer.” Her image on the news and in documentaries presented a large, beaten-down woman who did seem to be monstrous. Evidence against her was given by Selby Wall (Christina Ricci), an 18-year-old who became the older woman’s naive lesbian lover and inspired Aileen’s dream of earning enough money to set them up in a “normal” lifestyle. Robbing her clients led to murder, and each new murder seemed necessary to cover the tracks leading from the previous one.
I confess that I walked into the screening not knowing who the star was, and that I did not recognize Charlize Theron until I read her name in the closing credits. Not many others will have that surprise; she was just honored as best actress of the year by the National Society of Film Critics. I didn’t recognize her — but more to the point, I hardly tried, because the performance is so focused and intense that it becomes a fact of life. Observe the way Theron controls her eyes in the film; there is not a flicker of inattention, as she urgently communicates what she is feeling and thinking. There’s the uncanny sensation that Theron has forgotten the camera and the script and is directly channeling her ideas about Aileen Wuornos. She has made herself the instrument of this character.
I have already learned more than I wanted to about the techniques of disguise used by makeup artist Toni G. to transform an attractive 28-year-old into an ungainly street prostitute, snapping her cigarette butt into the shadows before stepping forward to talk with a faceless man who has found her in the shadows of a barren Florida highway. Watching the film, I had no sense of makeup technique; I was simply watching one of the most real people I had ever seen on the screen. Jenkins, the writer-director, has made the best film of the year. Movies like this are perfect when they get made, before they’re ground down by analysis. There is a certain tone in the voices of some critics that I detest — that superior way of explaining technique in order to destroy it. They imply that because they can explain how Theron did it, she didn’t do it. But she does it.