Getting latex verisimilitude confused with acting ability, critics have championed Charlize Theron to become an Oscar front-runner with only minor pockets of dissent. More proof that Oscars are merely bought rather than earned, Monster, the wretched Aileen Wuornos biopic was produced by the award-starved Ms. Theron herself. The press notes dared call it an anti-vanity project, and the press has capitulated. Virtually unwatchable from first frame to last, this appropriation of Nick Broomfield and E! True Hollywood Story gimmicks follows convicted serial killer Wuornos’s final years before her Florida execution—from her tentative lesbian relationship with “Selby Wall” (“Ah’ve never done this before...”) to her constant plugging of johns in decrepit pickup trucks—without a hint of insight or empathy. Not exploitative? Theron uses Wuornos’s ticks and grimaces as a sort of carny act, while first-time writer/director Patty Jenkins’s overlays an “ironic” soundtrack to undermine her desperate circumstances at every turn: A montage of Aileen trying to find respectable work is played as high farce, while Eighties power ballads reduce Aileen and Selby’s relationship to dismissive preteen-ish angst. Theron’s achievement is technical but overly calculated, while Ricci delivers the most embarrassing performance seen outside of an NYU student film production—her huge Hello Kitty eyes reveal nothing more than huge pupils, her head-tossing technique wouldn’t be out of place in a dinner theater production of Picnic (but then again, how easy is it to maintain actorly integrity when spouting lines like, “Aileen, you have to stop killing people!”). Perhaps critics had become so familiar with Aileen’s story due to Broomfield’s investigative documentaries that they’re willing to overlook Jenkins’s oversights and label the film as “compassionate.” Crusading auteur Jenkins selflessly discloses: “In the hours before her passing, Aileen’s best friend Dawn lobbied her for consent to support our film. Finally, Aileen fearfully gave her blessing to open her archive of personal letters in the hopes that Charlize Theron and I would tell a truth she herself had never known how to tell...” Denying to incorporate any sort of integral back story (a history of abuse and abandonment), Jenkins ends up doing Wuornos’s memory a gross disservice. Those unfamiliar with the true events will be wondering why this blood is being spilt—to leave her excuses as “She was caught in a suffocating man’s world” does indeed make her out to be no more than a monster, and ignores the intended irony of the title. Apart from a brief opening glimpse of her childhood overlaid with voiceover nonsense (“I always wanted to be a star...”), her childhood is refused, her serious mental illness—a major factor in the case against her execution—is never spoken of. At the remarkably truncated close, Aileen marches to her death, just another death penalty victim, no more, no less—no one in particular.
—MICHAEL KORESKY