Ray Pride

Cartoons have taken over the movies.

"Finding Nemo" is one of 2003's biggest hits, and Charlize Theron's ferocious, rage-filled but deeply caricatured, intensely aggravating performance as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkin's debut feature "Monster" has been identified by a handful of reviewers as one of the best performances ever put on celluloid.

It's a mystifying reaction, particularly if you afford yourself the chance of seeing either of Nick Broomfield's documentaries about the convicted murderer, especially "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer," by Broomfield and his usual cameraperson Joan Churchill (it plays at the Siskel Film Center this month and in February at the Landmark Century.)

Wuornos was a Florida drifter and prostitute whose troubled life and troubling experiences led to her conviction for the murder of six men, including a policeman. She pled self-defense, but Wuornos was executed in 2003 after twelve years on Death Row and a cursory psychological examination and Governor Jeb Bush's death warrant. While Broomfield's documentary captures the latter-day rantings of the obviously disturbed Wuornos, Jenkin's fiction film covers a few weeks, after Wuornos meets a lonely young woman, Selby Wall (Christina Ricci, in a performance filled with need but somehow empty), and Wuornos attempts to impress Selby and sustain their life on the run, through more prostitution and eventually, murder. She may be a victim of life, but she's a killer, a terror, a monster, as well. Why does Wuornos matter? From watching "Monster," the movie, I could not tell you.

The approach taken by Brett Ratner protégé Jenkins is deadpan in an extreme, with most scenes shot in a calm medium or long shot. The only truly lurid element in this potentially tabloid tale of "America's first female serial killer" is Theron's depiction of Wuornos--whom she met and described as "the most hopeful person I've ever encountered"--as a goggle-eyed, radioactively unapproachable outsider. Wuornos herself, selfish, canny but obviously ill in Broomfield's pair of documentaries, never seems to perform, even when she's calculating. It's a conundrum of fiction versus documentary representation. Theron gained weight, plucked her eyebrows, dimmed the luster of her good looks. Has that become the essence of acting? Physical transformation or self-abuse?

Theron is very, very good, demonic, even, as this cockroach, an irredeemable psychopath from start to finish, but the performance is astonishingly off-putting and out of line with the pretentious calm of the rest of the picture. If I hadn't seen the real Wuornos on film, I probably would have rejected the performance entirely, with its similarity to "Runaway Train"-era Jon Voight imitating Bugs Bunny. So what can we do with a heartfelt performance in a film that attempts to depict "truth" without drama?

There is subjectivity, we presume when we watch what is presented as "documentary" versus fiction that is smothered by poker-faced drama. The camera stares, and is that reserve? Is that esthetic taciturnity? Or an occasion for us to gawk? "Monster" is a genteel roadwreck. One of the two most affecting elements is the striking casting of johns, Wuornos' murder victims. Each, in their few moments on screen, works with gestures as exact as the motions of a hairdresser's shears.

The second is the soundtrack. I listened to BT's lovely, dark score a few times after seeing "Monster," and it took on a life of its own. Shorn of the movie, clever motifs and haunting melodies emerged. From watching the movie, I mostly recall the first-kiss scene between the couple, rollerskating to an especially bathetic Journey song.

The distance between Broomfield's documentary and Jenkin's indie glumness also reminded me of the perplex of trying to depict live music in fictional contexts. The experience is so different that it almost never works, with the best music documentaries being the likes of Bob Dylan's self-invention of his 24-year-old wiseguy persona in "Don't Look Back," demonstrating his youthful scheming and dreaming. It is not performance, but persona, that translates.

Aileen Wuornos was an angry woman. A killer. A mentally ill woman whose troubles worsened after more than a decade on Death Row. True story. But being true doesn't make it good, it doesn't make it truthful as anecdote or as art. A thing happens. But a thing needs to be transformed, illuminated, not merely imitated. Imitation is the sincerest form of craving an Oscar.

"Monster" opens Friday.

(2004-01-06)

Also by Ray Pride

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