Monster will be an oscar killing
Monster
Director: Patty Jenkins
Cast: Charlize Theron, Christina Ricci, Bruce Dern, Lee Tergesen, Annie Corley
Cert: 18.
South African-born beauty Theron had never been considered a Hollywood A-List star … until she made this harrowing but truly memorable drama.
For her compelling performance as Aileen Wuornos, dubbed America’s first female serial killer, Theron walked away with this year’s Best Actress Oscar, deservedly.
Her performance, for which she put on weight and frumped herself up, is brilliant in that she manages to capture, with surprising sympathy and understanding, the awful life Wuornos led before her killing spree during the l990s: abused as a child, a life of drugs and prostitution, lesbianism and more abuse until she was driven to seeing off seven men.
She was executed even as this memorable film was being shot in 2002, and her ghost was said to have haunted the set.
Director Jenkins also wrote the screenplay and keeps it straight and honest in its search for what went wrong in her subject’s sad life. The story concentrates on the last two years of Wuornos’s life.
Another great strength of the film lies in a powerful performance by Ricci as the calculating lesbian lover of Wuornos.
You will not see a better-constructed and played film for a long time.
Star Rating: 5/5
