Monster's Ball
Monster's Ball on DVD |
Monster's Ball is not an easy film
to watch -- and I mean that as a very high compliment. What typically makes fiction go
down easy is all the little ways that it doesn't resemble real life. Characters can truly
communicate with one another, everything goes from point A to point B without meandering,
and we never have to worry about a character's future or past, because narrative fiction
exists in the big now.
Life, on the other hand, is messy. It doesn't have to make
sense. And even good people can live entire lifetimes without ever getting a single break.
So I have to wonder, is one reason Monster's Ball
works so well because its screenwriters Milo Addica and Will Rokos (both of whom also act
in the film) have never written a movie script before? It's only director Marc Foster's
third film -- maybe he hasn't learned yet that you can't deal with genuine emotions and
real life in a film. If Monster's Ball is so successful because of the creative
team's lack of experience rather than in spite of it, then what are we paying all those
Hollywood pros for?
No, the reason the film succeeds is that it is a skillfully
made, carefully observed labor of love. It's not perfect -- it veers perilously close to
melodrama in places. But it doesn't deal with big issues or capital-letter concepts. It
deals with a small group of people and their hard, lonely lives.
It boasts a spectacular cast. Halle Berry and Billy Bob
Thornton are superb, but they are supported by a phenomenal cast that includes Peter
Boyle, Heath Ledger, and Sean (P-Daddy) Combs.
The story revolves around Hank (Thornton), a guard on the
death row of a prison remarkably like Louisiana's Angola State Prison. He's the abused son
of a former prison guard (Boyle) and at the same time, he's the abusive father whose son
works with him in the condemned cells.
Leticia (Berry) is the wife of a condemned man, the mother
of an overweight boy, and a waitress at the local diner. Berry is immensely successful at
damping down her stellar glamour and becoming a woman who has run out of last chances.
Recovering from a family tragedy, Hank quits his job and
rattles around his house, being harangued by his racist father and serving out an
excruciatingly slow-moving life sentence of loneliness. He meets Leticia at the diner
where he eats ice cream in the middle of the night and gradually gets to know her;
ultimately they become lovers.
A real Hollywood film would have made that the triumphant
final scene -- the two of them have conquered loneliness at last! Except, of course,
nothing of the sort has happened. Two people separated by all the gulfs our society could
throw at them came together in mutual loneliness, pain, and fear. That's not an ending --
it's a beginning.
Hank and Leticia know each other from the diner, without a
suspicion of their further connection with one another. A lesser film might have gloried
in that tension or constructed a feel-good ending out of it. Monster's Ball,
however, uses the completely different ways that these two process the information to show
the gulf that still exists between them: Hank does nothing, hoping that Leticia never
finds out; Leticia does nothing, ultimately, because she has no options.
And that's where the film ends. Things may work out, or the
two may get overwhelmed by all the extraneous pressures -- we have no way of knowing and
the film makers wisely don't try to telegraph any simple or satisfying answers.
Berry and Thornton make us care passionately about these
characters. In the weeks since I first saw the film, I've caught myself wondering about
Leticia and Hank. How are things going -- are they doing okay? I can count the films that
have made me care this deeply, this real-ly about their protagonists on the fingers
of one hand. This is the way we should care about art -- but when was the last time
you felt that way about a movie?
Maybe we should take film out of the hands of pros and give
it back to the amateurs. They certainly can't do worse and, as Monster's Ball so
amply shows, perhaps they could do it a lot better.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhometheater.com
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