Monster's Ball
Review
by : Eric Barker
Starring:
Billy Bob Thornton (Hank Grotowski), Halle
Berry (Leticia Musgrove), Peter Boyle (Buck Grtowski),
Heath Ledger (Sonny Grotowski) Sean Combs (Lawrence Musgrove)
Written by: Milo Addica & Will Rooks
Directed by: Marc Foster
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A veteran prison guard is forced to reexamine his world
when a routine execution goes wrong, and he becomes involved
with the condemned man‘s widow.
A gut-wrenching
drama of ignorance and redemption in the modern South, Monster’s
Ball extends its condemnation outward into American society
as a whole without ever succumbing to self-importance. That
is because director Marc Foster and his screenwriters (who
also produced) never forget their film is, at bottom, a story
of two tortured souls brought together by their mutual suffering
and loss.
The film
wisely takes its time describing a world in which grief and
rage are already a part of the daily diet, suffusing lives
filled with unanswered questions and resentment. Billy Bob
Thornton’s Hank is a taciturn, thoroughly embittered man,
incapable of acknowledging the simplest human emotions and
living in a prison of his own making, taking care of his sick
father (played frighteningly well by Peter Boyle), an impossible
curmudgeon whose virulent racism is merely a subset of his
all-encompassing misanthropy. Hank has wasted his life living
up to his father’s twisted expectations, and to such an extent
that he no longer knows his own mind, sowing distrust and
contempt in his relationship with his own son.
Meanwhile,
Halle Berry’s Leticia is an exhausted young woman, old before
her time, struggling to maintain a drop of sanity as her husband
faces his last day on earth and she contemplates raising a
young boy on her own, a boy whose obsessive overeating and
complete lack of self-esteem is driving her to the limits
of her parenting skills. While the script is detailing the
gruesome steps toward executing a man in the electric chair,
it is also laying down a multi-layered view of three different
generations of intractable parents, and of the sons who can
never live up to the world’s expectations of manhood, including
their own beliefs about what they should be.
All of
that is changed in a single moment, when Hank’s boy Sonny,
also a prison guard, allows his compassion to interfere with
the protocols of execution. Although it doesn’t affect things
immediately, it sends all the survivor’s lives on a spiraling
collision course with disruptive, sometimes tragic change,
and finally, the self-redemptive power of forgiveness.
What is
most amazing, and pleasing, about Monster‘s Ball is
its ability to skirt the perilous edges of melodrama and still
tell a story with profound emotional resonance. A starkly
honest film, unafraid to plumb the darkest beliefs and impulses
of its characters, Monster’s Ball dares to challenge both
a viewer’s sympathies, and their patience, as it explores
a universe of nearly unbearable pain on its journey toward
the beautifully imagined, nearly silent finale. This could
be the only film of 2001, or the last several years for that
matter, which begins in utter darkness, and moves toward a
genuine sense of hope, bit by uncomfortable bit.
Halle
Berry’s Oscar nominated performance is indeed wonderful, her
best opportunity to be a real actor since her convincing turn
as a drug addict in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991).
Whether she is chain smoking through a tight-lipped final
meeting with her husband, confessing her weaknesses in a hilarious
drunk scene, or raging in a hospital emergency room, she plunges
headlong into Leticia’s thousand contradictions and hones
each one with the confidence of an artist who has actually
been there. After Monster’s Ball, she shouldn’t have
to do junk like Swordfish (also 2001) unless she wants
to.
But the
most daring performance in the film comes from Billy Bob Thornton,
taking center stage and doing his best work since 1996s Sling
Blade (although I hear last year’s The Man Who Wasn’t
There is pretty darn good, as well). In a role that dares
the audience to hate him, he creates a racist shithead out
of whole cloth and then slowly, subtly, reveals how such a
person becomes who they are, and how they might earn forgiveness
for their unthinking past. A welcome relief from recent missteps,
like his mawkish fumbling of the dumb brother in A Simple
Plan (1998) and his uninspired adaptation of All the
Pretty Horses (2000), this is Thornton stripped of pretense
and reminding us he is without doubt one of contemporary America’s
greatest actors.
A film
about parents and sons that exemplifies the overused phrase
tour de force. Outstanding screenplay by newcomers Milo Addica
and Will Rooks; fine cinematography by Roberto Schaefer, much
of it at night; and Sean “Puffy” Combs is excellent in a minor
role as Leticia’s condemned husband, yet another of the film’s
lost men trying to rise above a regrettable past.
The title
refers to a condemned man’s last request.
Notes:
OSCAR
WATCH: nominated for Best Actress and Original Screenplay.
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