Originally released December 24, 2003:

Monster follows the life of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron, now nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), America’s only known female serial killer. In the late 1980s, Wueros was a roadside prostitute flexing her muscles with Florida motorists. She describes “hookin’’” as the only things she’s ever been good at. One day Wuornos has the full intention of taking her own life, but she meets 18-year-old Selby (Christina Ricci) at a lesbian bar and finds a companion. Driven by a growing hatred of men from sexual abuse, Wuorno’s starts killing her johns to try and establish a comfortable life for her and Selby.

Let’’s not mince words; Theron gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life. Yes, that’’s right. One of. The. Best. Performances. Ever. This is no exaggeration. I’’m not just throwing out niceties. Theron is completely unrecognizable under a mass of facial prosthetics, 30 extra pounds, fake teeth and a total lack of eyebrows. But this is more than a hollow ploy to attract serious attention to the acting of a pretty face. Theron does more than simple imitation; she fully inhabits the skin of Aileen Wuornos. The closest comparison I can think of is Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in The Doors.

Theron is commanding, brave, distressing, ferocious, terrifying, brutal, stirring, mesmerizing and always captivating. It may be a cliché, but you really cannot take your eyes off of her. Her performance is that amazing. To say that Theron in Monster is an acting revelation is perhaps the understatement of the year.

With previous acting roles in Reindeer Games and The Cider House Rules, Theron is usually delegated to “pretty girlfriend” roles (who occasionally shows her breasts). Who in the world thought she had this kind of acting capability? I certainly did not. If Nicole Kidman can win an Oscar for putting on a fake nose and a so-so performance, surely Theron should win an Oscar for her absolute transformation of character and giving the performance of a lifetime.

With this being said, and most likely over said, Monster is by no means a perfect film. Minus the terrific central performance, Monster is more of an everyday profile of a grotesque personality. The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster. Some supporting characters, like Ricci’’s narrow-minded Christian up bringers, are flat characters bordering on parody. The supporting characters are generally underwritten, especially the male roles that serve as mere cameos in a film dominated by sapphic love.

Monster is proof positive that human beings will never be phased out by advancing machinery when it comes to acting. Monster boasts one of the greatest acting achievements in recent cinematic history, but it also coasts on sharp cinematography and a moody and ambient score by BT (Go). Monster is a haunting film that you won’’t want to blink for fear of taking your eyes off of Theron. She gives an unforgettable tour de force performance that will become legendary.

Nate’s Grade: B

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Monster was a revelation for Charlize Theron, an actress who until then had mostly been known for parts that asked that she be good looking and little else. Twenty years later, Theron is one of the best actresses working in Hollywood and it almost never happened without her breakthrough performance where she brought to startling life the horror of Aileen Wuornos’s tragic life and tragic desperation. When this movie came out originally in 2003, I doubt anyone but Theron’s closest friends suspected she was capable of a performance this raw and spellbinding, but that’s also a condemnation on all of us. How many other actresses out there could maybe rival the best of the best if they just had the right opportunity? How many actresses are stuck playing the same limited roles because that’s all they’re ever asked to do? How many actresses are wrongly assumed to be of limited talent simply because of their comely appearance? That isn’t to say there’s some hidden universal equation that the uglier you are the better at acting you have to be (though it sure has worked out for [insert your example of a conventionally unattractive actor here]), but this movie is a clear indication that too many actors are never given enough opportunities to shine.

Back in early 2004, I credited Theron’s performance as one of the best I’ve ever witnessed in my then-twenty-one years of moviegoing (although that number should be smaller considering I wasn’t keenly watching Scorsese as a baby). She is very good, but I’d like to claw back some of my rapturous words of praise now that we’ve seen twenty years of Theron acting excellence. Looking over her career, I might actually cite 2011’s Young Adult as her finest performance, and that one didn’t even nab an Oscar nomination (she’s since been nominated twice since, for 2005’s North Country and 2019’s Bombshell). The draw of the movie is the head-turning performance from Theron and she just disappears completely inside the skin of her subject. It’s hard to remember at times that this is Theron, thanks to the richness of her startling performance but also the accomplished makeup effects, which were not nominated. At every point, you feel the fire burning behind the stricken complexion of Theron, a fire that will eventually consume her and everything she loves. While highly compelling, this is not a performance of subtlety and restraint. This is a big performance, and the movie is often prone to making loud pronouncements about its subjects and pertinent themes. It’s loud, brash, and maybe for some it will seem a little too loud, a little too unsubtle, but it’s a movie that refuses to be ignored for good reason.

In my original review I raised some reservations with the rest of the movie, and I’m here to recant one of them. I wrote back in 2004, “The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster.” I’m positive that many will still cling to this same idea but oh boy have I come around in twenty years. By the time the movie is over, you wonder why more women haven’t just snapped and gone on killing sprees. Wuornos is indeed a victim. She’s responsible for terrible deeds but that doesn’t change the fact that she started as a victim and continued as one until put to death by the state of Florida in 2002. She was a sexual assault survivor, groomed into prostitution, and then trapped by a society that saw her as little other than trash, something to be pitied but ultimately forgotten. She comes of age as an adult thinking her only value is the fleeting moments of pleasure she can provide for men, and in the narration, we hear her dreams that one of these men who repeatedly tell her how pretty she is would take her away to another life, like a princess. Alas. It’s impossible to separate her past as a victim of predatory men from her actions when she turns on predatory men. Being forced into prostitution out of desperation is one of the definitions for sex slavery and trafficking. The movie does try to make her last few johns more ambiguous over whether or not they are “good people” and thus “deserving” of their fates, like a scale is being introduced and we’re doing the calculation whether Wuornos will strike (#NotAllMen, eh felas?). There’s a clear dark path where the murders get considerably worse. She begins by defending herself against a rapist, but by the end, it’s just a kind family man who picked her up without even the intention of having sex. We’re meant to see her transform into the titular monster, but I kept wondering about Aileen Wuornos as the societal stand-in, accounting for thousands of other women who lived and died under similar tragic circumstances.

I also found myself growing increasingly contemptuous of the love interest character played by Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets). When we’re introduced to Selby, she’s a wide-eyed naif testing her boundaries of comfort but clearly tapping into repressed homosexual feelings. Their relationship is meant to serve as the emotional rock for Wuornos, the reason that she’s acting more rash is because she’s trying to earn enough money for the two of them to run away together and build a new life. She is her motivation, but Selby is absolutely the worst. You can excuse some of her hemming and hawing about striking out on her own and leaving her controlling parents, as she’s fighting against repression as well as trepidation for starting out independently, but this lady becomes fully aware of the dangers and dehumanization that Aileen goes through to earn her meager amounts of money, and Selby encourages her to do so. Not just encourages her, Selby pressures her to do so, to get back out there and “provide” for her, knowing fully well what that means, knowing fully well how these men have treated Wournos, repeatedly abusing her. What are you doing to help things out, huh Selby? She’s embarrassed hanging around Wuornos around some other lesbian friends she just met, so she’s already looking to upgrade and move past her lover. By the end, as she’s trying to coax a confession of guilt from her girlfriend to save her own skin, Selby becomes just another user, taking what they want from Wuornos and discarding her when they’ve had their fill.

This was the directorial debut for Patty Jenkins, who also served as the sole credited screenwriter, and while the indie darling-to-franchise blockbuster pipeline has been alive and well in Hollywood, it was quite a surprising leap that her next movie after Monster was none other than 2017’s Wonder Woman. To go from this small character-driven true crime indie to leading the big screen solo outing for comics’ most famous female hero is quite a bizarre but impressive jump. Her only other feature credit is the much less heralded 2020 Wonder Woman sequel. She was attached to direct a Star Wars movie about fighter pilots but that seems to have gone into turnaround or just canceled. So is the way with Star Wars movies after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker. Just ask the Game of Thrones creators, Josh Trank, and Taika Watiti how that goes.

Monster is a phenomenal performance with a pretty okay movie wrapped around it in support. Twenty years later, Theron is still a monster you can’t take your eyes away from. It changed her career destiny and I think acts as an exemplar for two reasons: leaving the viewer with the question how many other wonderfully talented performers will never get the chance to showcase their true talents because of faulty assumptions, and how many other women are out there living in quiet degradation like Aileen Wuornos.

Re-Veiw Grade: B