Monster

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 2 of 10 / Overall: 45 of 100

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the pre-credits title card “based on a true story” can strike fear into the heart of even the most hardened movie buff. The phrase often covers a multitude of sins. For “sins” read inconsistencies, inaccuracies, blatant fabrications, composite characters and redacted timelines. And to be fair, filmmakers kind of have to. Even if your subject is, say, Jim Morrison – who died at the age of 27 – a two and a half hour movie about that person’s life will still have to be incredibly selective in terms of what to feature, what to depict. Composite characters help reduce timelines; blatant fabrications are sometimes necessary to provide context.

All told, the biopic is something of a poisoned chalice. A filmmaker can draw as much flak for basing their movie on disputed material. Take Bernard Rose’s ‘Immortal Beloved’: a barnstorming performance by Gary Oldman, the music of Beethoven used contextually and often very imaginatively, a couple of inspired moments of visual poetry … and yet Rose bases his screenplay on Anton Schindler’s account of the maestro’s life – a version all but written off by academics and historians as spurious at best and almost certainly whitewashed by Schindler in order to claim a far greater importance as Beethoven’s friend and professional associate than was actually the case.

Patty Jenkins’s ‘Monster’ seems to draw from a multitude of sources. Aileen Wuornos’s own witness-stand account of the first killing – motivated by her rape at the hands of a client – is graphically depicted in the film; the other killings, however, have no sexual imperative beyond Wuornos picking the men up as potential clients, instead using the secluded areas they take her to as cover for robbery and murder. These scenes smack of Wuornos’s recanted story just before her execution – a recantation that Nick Broomfield’s second documentary on Wuornos exposes as a ploy to expedite said execution.

‘Monster’ also replaces Wuornos’ turncoat partner Tyria Moore with a fictional stand-in character, Shelby Wall (Christina Ricci), who serves the same narrative function as Moore (ie. requires Wuornos to go back to in-car prostitution in order to provide for her; and promptly sells her out to the cops the moment the heat comes down) but is demonstrably different in terms of characterisation. I guess this was a compromise Jenkins and her collaborators had little choice in since Moore is still alive (although thought to be living under an assumed name) and could conceivably sue.

Jenkins’s script probes Wuornos (Charlize Theron)’s troubled background in superficial depth, mainly concerning itself with depicting the relationship between Wuornos and Wall. This is both the film’s strength and weakness. For all that her film is called ‘Monster’, Jenkins is generally even-handed in depicting Wuornos as a flawed and temperamental human being but a human being nonetheless. On the minus side, any real psychological approach is jettisoned in favour of an increasingly shrill series of altercations between Wuornos and Wall (Ricci’s portrayal of Wall as clingy, demanding and immature – while a good piece of acting – adds up to a pathetic and annoying character) occasionally punctuated by a murder.

Nonetheless, Theron gives the performance of her career, the incredibly gorgeous actress disappearing into the old-before-her-time visage of Wuornos. Watching the film a day after the Broomfield documentaries (‘The Selling of a Serial Killer’ was apparently Theron’s go-to resource for her portrayal) is to marvel at how unnervingly convincing Theron is; it’s not just the look or the voice, but the entire panoply of facial expressions and mannerisms. The Oscar was richly deserved.

Elsewhere, the film has some minor flaws (the pacing is a tad uneven; the soundtrack is contrived instead of seeming organic; and there’s no real visual flair, Jenkins and her DoP Steven Bernstein conjuring far fewer grittily iconic images than you’d expect given the material), but there’s not an ounce of sensationalism, nor does Jenkins’s attempt to humanise Wuornos tip over into cloying melodrama of the “tragic heroine” school. Ultimately, ‘Monster’ – made just a year after Wuornos’s execution – is a good film that falls somewhat short of being great but is gifted with a simply awesome central performance.

Wuornos weekend

Shots on the Blog goes into dark territory this weekend with three Aileen Wuornos related movies. Today, a double bill of the acclaimed Nick Broomfield documentaries – ‘Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer’ and ‘Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer’ – and tomorrow Patty Jenkins’s ‘Monster’, for which Charlize Theron bagged a grimly deserved Oscar.

Wuornos hailed from a white-trash background and it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to join the dots of her troubled childhood and adolescence and arrive at the conclusion that her life was pretty much headed on a certain course from the outset. This from the Wikipedia article (which draws heavily on Michael Reynolds’s book ‘Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction and Execution of Female Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos’):

“Her mother, Diane Pratt, was 15 years old when she married Leo Dale Pittman …Piittman was a child molester who spent most of his life in and out of prison. Wuornos never met her father, as he was imprisoned for the rape and attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy at the time of her birth. Leo Pittman hanged himself in prison in 1969 … From a young age, Wuornos engaged in sex with multiple partners, including her own brother. At the age of 13, she became pregnant, claiming the pregnancy was a result of being raped by an unknown man.”

When, at the age of 15, Wuornos’s grandfather (at this point her legal ward) threw her out of his house, she turned to prostitution to sustain herself. A brief (nine week) marriage to an older man in the mid-70s seems to have been a union of convenience. Wuornos unexpectedly came into some money following the death of her brother and the marriage ended.

Wuornos proved temperamental and several violent outbursts at a local bar, to the extent of her hurling a cue ball at the bartender’s head, landed her in jail for a spell. A convenience store robbery, the passing of forged cheques and grand theft auto rounded out her criminal credentials. She met Tyria Moore in 1986 and they moved in together. Wuornos was evidently deeply committed and referred to Moore as her “wife”. She supported them by continuing her career in prostitution.

Between November 1989 and November 1990, Wuornos shot and killed seven of her clients. It’s notable that the first, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist who had spent ten years in a psychiatric facility for his violent acts against women. Wuornos claimed her killing of him was self-defence. It may have been Mallory’s rape of her that brought all the demons of her childhood howling back. I’m going no further with that thought: this article is merely a prologue to the cinematic portrayals, either documentarian or fictional, of Aileen Wuornos and I’d rather base my opinions on the films themselves.

What is certain is that the story didn’t end with Wuornos’s arrest. There was a spectacular betrayal, some grossly inappropriate conduct by police and lawyers, the mammothly hypocritical involvement of a supposed Christian and wholesale exploitation. Pre-arrest, Wuornos was clearly the villain of the piece (whatever litigation may be offered in terms of her troubled background, the nature of her profession and the behaviour of her clients). Post-arrest, her role was recast as that of victim.