Monster's Ball

Directed by Marc Forster
Written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos
Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Heath Ledger, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle
USA, 2001

B-

[Spoilers ahead.]
The final shot in Monster’s Ball is of the starry night sky – a comforting blanket for the two lovers (Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton) who have suffered incredible losses. And in the movie, pain and suffering are fetishized with such wild zest that everything does become cosmic. The screenplay skillfully shrugs off the coincidence it pivots on as if it were as inherent in life and human nature as racism, but the implausible shifts and turns loom dissonantly as writers Milo Addica and Will Rokos position themselves as God. It’s a bit of a shame; last year’s The Deep End packed so much delicious romantic and family drama into its silly twists that the material was raised above soap opera frivolity (housewife Tilda Swinton and her estranged gay son found a way to connect by telepathically sharing their sadness over the heartaches men had caused them). Here, Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton can also connect on that level: Berry’s husband (Sean “P. Diddy” Combs) has failed her, and Thornton’s father is a creep and his son too sensitive. Monster’s Ball works its two burdened leads into a frazzle, and too often we feel the distance. The potency of an execution scene never matches Dead Man Walking, even when it utilizes similar close-ups, and there’s nothing new or probing about the way the Southern White Bigot calls Berry the N-word. The movie climaxes with a Dirty South riff on Pillow Talk. I sat there, thinking about my spoiled suburban existence, and said to myself, “We need these kinds of films to ruffle us up a little,” but the sorrow is devalued from conception.

Predictably, the actors dominate this obsessive yet detached arthouse exercise. But the characters and their situations are old contrivances: the woman’s husband and child die and leave her all alone in the world, and the man is presented as both the victim and perpetrator of the Sins of the Fathers and becomes the hero when he sheds his racism and misogyny by dating a black lady. Billy Bob Thornton, full of crooning sentimentality and good-samaritanism, is brilliant. Halle Berry only builds on the clichés by bringing some more of her own – the huffing and puffing and cigarette-smoking – but, with her make-up artist, she becomes raw, sweaty, and sincerely at the end of her rope, instead of triumphantly depressed as the script would like her to be. She has wonderful comic moments, even at her most devastating; watch her fidget nervously as she thinks about her husband’s execution merely hours away, or the moments preceding sex with Thornton. The stunning sequence segues from humor into the sex so quickly and frictionally that director Marc Forster doesn’t give us time to get comfortable with it, and the unglamorous catharsis drags on longer than we expect.

Instead of going from love to sex, the couple goes backwards, building romance from sexual need. The complexity arises when Berry becomes a seeming replacement for the prostitute Thornton jadedly sodomized in earlier scenes; she gladly accepts the stable food and shelter the white man can give her that her black men could not, in exchange for what seems to be constant sex. If Monster’s Ball were a better, more intelligent film, it would be more playful, too; instead we are left with these societal inhibitions without ever confronting them. We are surprised when we get a determinate romantic gesture, one whose beauty belongs solely to the actors: Berry builds the suspense and then finally half-smiles as she eats chocolate ice cream off of Thornton’s spoon. The two actors form a chemistry interesting and touching enough to carry the flawed film.

By Andrew Chan [FEBRUARY 17, 2002]