January 8-14, 2004

movies

In Hot Blood

Long time gone: Theron (right) as Aileen Wuornos, with Ricci.

Monster's Aileen Wuornos is a killer driven by passion and trauma.

by Cindy Fuchs

"I always wanted to be in the movies." These are the first words in Patty Jenkins’ film about Aileen Wuornos, the female serial killer executed in October 2002. As Monster will go on to underline, Aileen’s ambition is tragically ironic. In fact, her unhappy, defiant life, it turns out, has been the subject of more than one movie, including the made-for-TV Overkill (1992) and two documentaries by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992), and the upcoming Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer.

While the documentaries explore the failures of social and legal systems to sort out Wuornos' convoluted story (her childhood abuse, her mental illness, her exploitation by tabloids, courts and individuals), the biopics predictably focus on personal tragedies and crises. To its credit, Jenkins' film, which only occasionally resorts to melodrama, doesn't show Aileen to be a "monster" without context. Instead, it presents her descent into violence and madness as a process as frightening to her as it is to you.

Still, Monster is fictionalized, conflating and reshaping events. It begins around the moment that Aileen (an impressively intent Charlize Theron) begins killing. In the film's timeline, this occurs just as she meets the unexpected love of her life, Selby Wall (distractingly awkward Christina Ricci), a character based on the real-life Tyria Moore. A prostitute since the age of 13, Aileen is destitute and suicidal when she meets Selby in a divey lesbian bar in central Florida. This is hardly the place Aileen expects to be: Insisting that she's "not gay," she also explains, in her indefatigably naive voiceover (over a montage of dodgy johns picking her up in beater cars), that she had long hoped to be "discovered," or at least "loved" for brief moments.

Because she's so miserable, the film suggests, Aileen reluctantly accepts Selby's offer to buy her a drink. As the relationship develops, the cast on Selby's arm becomes all too significant: fragile and whiny, she's primed for Aileen to rescue her from an overbearing (offscreen and Christian) father. In turn, Aileen wants to be the hero; tired of waiting for her own future to commence, she sees her better self reflected in Selby's relentlessly needy eyes.

This self takes shape most immediately and vehemently in response to a john (Lee Tergesen) who rapes and tortures her. As the film has it, she's turned this particular trick at the last minute, in an effort to afford a decent date with Selby. With her own life at risk, Aileen's violence looks almost like self-defense. The fact that she shoots him multiple times seems a function of her years of abuse and frustration, suddenly let loose. As grim as this scene is, her eventual arrival at Selby's doorstep, bruised and wearing the dead man's trucker's cap, is even more unnerving. When Selby complains about the missed date, all Aileen can say is, "I really fuckin' meant to be here, OK?" Indeed, this will become a sort of refrain -- she means to change, to "clean up," to get a legitimate job to support her woman, but she never has a chance.

According to Monster, even if Aileen's intentions are admirably romantic, she remains disastrously mystified by everyday existence. Putting on a cheap, colorful dress, she applies for secretarial jobs; even as she wants to trust that "all you need in life is love and to believe in yourself," she's increasingly enraged when no one will hire her. Desperate to provide for Selby, Aileen turns again and again to murdering johns, a bizarre sort of "vocation" that provides her with a sense of control for brief minutes.

These scenes are more and more disturbing, as she acts as if on impulse, then hates herself for what she's done. The movie doesn't show every one of Wuornos' seven murders, but offers a range from creeps to bumblers -- including an ill-at-ease virgin (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and a gentle, plainclothes lawman (Scott Wilson, one of the killers in 1967's In Cold Blood). Moreover, the film maintains she's not a man-hater per se, as she confides in the gnarly Vietnam veteran Tom (Bruce Dern), who pops up for convenient heart-to-hearts.

During one of these, Tom broaches an idea the film has no time to develop: Aileen is a victim of perpetual and undiagnosed trauma. This isn't to say that she looks especially sympathetic, but she does appear here as more complicated than evil. Jenkins told The New York Times that she "wanted to tell the truth, that I wanted to find that space in between the man-hating lesbian serial killer and the feminist hero."

While Monster is not so well-structured or nuanced as the film to which it has been repeatedly compared (Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry) and lapses occasionally into over-plotted clumsiness, it does find this space. The final moments -- Selby's betrayal and Aileen's outburst in court -- are testament to the combined horror and banality of her story. As she's led out in her orange jumpsuit, her voiceover reminds you of the articles of faith that have failed her: "Faith can move mountains, everything happens for a reason." Oh well, she says at last, "they gotta tell you somethin'."

Monster

Written and directed by Patty Jenkins A Newmarket release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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