Monster's Ball Review
by Tim Wick
The last night a condemned man spends on Earth, we are told, is called his
"Monster's Ball."
The film begins with just such an event. A condemned man (Sean Combs) is
about to be put to death. He has exhausted his appeals and there is no
question this will be the night. What did he do? It doesn't matter. He
knows that he is guilty of the crime that has brought him here and tells his
son that he is a bad man and that what they are doing to him is right. His
wife Leticia (Halle Berry) is detached and cold. One gets the impression
that she has no more emotion to give. She does not attend his execution.
The prison guard in charge of the execution is Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob
Thornton). He is showing his son, Sonny (Heath Ledgar) the ropes.
But this is not a movie about death row or a movie about a condemned man.
The title refers to a point in time where the lives of all these characters
change. In a sense, they are all put to death that night, but some of them
have a chance to rediscover themselves.
The film is filled with incongruous images. Until a scene late in the film,
sex is not arousing. The first time it is depicted, it probably ranks as
one of the least titillating sexual acts in the history of film making.
Since we have been taught to believe that there is something inherently
arousing about a sexual encounter, it is a bit jarring when we are in fact
repulsed as if we were watching - say - a rape scene despite the fact that
the sex is certainly consensual. Later, sex becomes an act of desperation
and we feel like a voyeur that is trapped in the wrong house. Only once
does it feel like an act of genuine tenderness that is born out of love.
The characters in this film are not perfect and at first they are not
particularly likeable. Leticia is not a very good mother. She loves her
son well enough, but constantly berates him for being overweight. Hank is a
horrible father. We get the feeling he resents his son rather than cares
for him. His own father, Buck (the absolutely phenomenal Peter Doyle), is a
vicious racist who has complete control over the household despite being
nearly debilitated by emphysema. There are no positive parental role models
in this film. The parents are killers or emotional manipulators or
physically abuse their children. One gets the feeling of a horrible inertia
that grips these people's lives. Is Hank a horrible father because he has
no better example from which to learn or is he just a cad?
Even as we don't like the characters, we can see them groping for something
better. Their lives are a mess. Their relationships with the world around
them is tenuous at best. Somehow they find each other.
It is easy to look at the relationship that develops between Leticia and
Hank as being all wrong. They are two lost souls looking for someone so
hard that the question of compatibility barely enters into the question.
Hank has absorbed his fathers racial hatred like a dutiful son and one
wonders how a relationship with someone like Leticia can be anything but
doomed. Leticia is saddled with so much emotional baggage from having spend
the last eleven years married to a condemned man that she cannot even relate
to her son in a healthy way. How can these two people possibly relate to
each other?
Monster's Ball works it's magic slowly. First, it makes us dislike Hank
and Leticia quite strongly. But we hate Buck practically from the minute we
first lay eyes on him. By making sure there is a character we dislike more
than the main characters, it becomes possible to care for them. Slowly we
watch them become acquainted and approach intimacy. Once they are intimate,
it takes a considerable amount of time before we feel as if they are
actually possibly in love with each other.
At first, we wonder if Hank is just doing this to crawl out from under his
father's thumb. His father was a prison guard and so Hank became one as
well. When Hank quits his job, it is a rebellion against his father. Is
his relationship with Leticia the same thing? Leticia clearly wonders the
same thing herself.
Halle Berry has an Oscar nomination for her role in this film and she is
unquestionably brilliant as Leticia. This is an actors movie and despite
fine direction and writing, it is the acting that shines through. What is
criminal is that Billy Bob Thornton and Peter Doyle were somehow overlooked.
Their performances are as central to the movie as Berry and they were
ignored by the academy. I suppose it could be argued that Thornton acted
himself out of a nomination by providing the academy with too many choices
(he was also terrific in The Man Who Wasn't There and Bandits), but I
can't see an excuse for passing over Doyle.
Buck is a horrible man, but he is horrible in a way we can believe. He is
not a campy "evil" character, he is the bigot we all have probably met at
least once in our lives. He is the manipulative grandparent most of us have
somewhere in our family. We hate him because we've had to live with someone
just like him and we know what it's like.
Thornton's Hank is a little bit like the character he played in The Man Who
Wasn't There in that he has spent most of his life as a rather detached
observer. But the difference is that he doesn't like it. He hates being on
the outskirts of life but doesn't know how to work his way back in. The joy
on his face when he makes the decision to do something different with his
life is one of the most strangely uplifting moments I've seen in a movie.
Heath Ledger's performance as Sonny is also a standout. I think of Ledgar
as the pretty boy from films like A Knights Tale and The Patriot but
this movie has made me start thinking of him as a serious actor.
To complain about Oscar snubs might imply I don't think Barry's work is
worthy of a nomination. That is not at all true. Leticia has a sort of
manic desperation that is vexingly mingled with a feeling of depressed
resolution. She is alternately convinced this is the best life will ever be
and desperately groping for something better.
Oddly, I think I was pulling for there characters far more than I would ever
have pulled for characters that were not deeply flawed. Even if their
relationship works out, Leticia still drinks too much. Even if his new life
makes Hank Happy, he still has racism issues. We never get the sense that
this is a relationship that is fated to succeed. In fact, we feel that it
is doomed to failure. As a result, we wish even more that it will not fail.
Roger Ebert picked Monster's Ball as the best film of 2001. Given how
many films Roger sees in a year and what a good year I feel 2001 was
overall, it says a lot about the quality of this film. The movie is an
oddly uplifting film because it shows people whose lives seem as if they
could only get worse finding a way to make their lives a little bit better.
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