The
Green Mile (1999) culminates with an electrocution
of a sweet African American that went awry, dramatizing an
actual incident involving the electric chair in Florida. Soon
after the film came out, the use of the electric chair was
banned in Florida. In the beginning of Monster’s
Ball, the slang name for the electrocution, we see
the electric chair used in Georgia on African American Tyrell
Musgrove (played by Coronji Calhoun), once again a man whom
filmviewers admire before he dies. The switch on the electricity
is turned on twice, so we can imagine the excruciating pain
that the victim must have suffered. But the rest of the film,
directed by Marc Forster, focuses on the pain visited on the
living. We see the condemned man’s wife Leticia Musgrove
(played by Halle Berry) slipping gradually into a condition
of homelessness, facing eviction because she is unable to
pay rent on her house, and his corpulent teenage son Lawrence
(played by Sean "Puffy" Combs), who eases his stress
by eating everything brought into the house as quickly as
possible. We also see Hank Gratowski (played by Billy Bob
Thornton), the senior corrections warden in charge of the
electric chair detail, go through a profound transformation
as the drama unfolds. Living with his bigoted but invalid
father Buck (played by Peter Boyle) and his grown-up son Sonny
(played by Heath Ledger), Hank starts out the film displaying
considerable racial prejudice. During a drill on how to conduct
the execution, he berates Sonny, a junior member of the detail,
for getting one element wrong. When the detail escorts Tyrell
to the execution chamber, Sonny vomits; then afterward, Hank
starts to beat up his son for being too soft. When Hank arrives
home, Sonny pulls a gun on his father, who confesses that
he hates him, and Sonny turns the gun on himself and dies.
Grief-stricken, Hank decides to resign from his corrections
job and buys a gas station. Unaware of the identity of Tyrell’s
spouse, Hank frequents a café and takes a liking to
Leticia. One day Leticia tries to go home with her son in
the rain, but a car accidentally runs over him. Hank passes
by the scene, hears screams, backs up to put the boy in car
and transport him to the nearest hospital, where he dies.
As a result, Hank tries to console Leticia, and in time the
two end up in the sack. As the film’s tagline says, "A
lifetime of change can happen in a single moment." Indeed,
after the many films denigrating the South as a place of rampant
racism, Monster's Ball shows the redemptive
consequence of a desegregated society, in which Blacks and
Whites mingle together and end up respecting each other. Hank
gives his pickup truck, nicknamed "Eliminator,"
to her when her car dies, and she buys him a cowboy hat after
pawning her gold wedding ring to raise cash for rent. When
she arrives at his house to deliver the hat, Buck humiliates
her, and she flees the scene, angry that she has been accused
of being a whore. Hank, nonetheless, persists in showing his
attention, parks Buck at a nursing home, and when she is forcibly
evicted, Hank shows up to escort her to live in his house.
A happy ending at last, in which racism (but not ageism) is
abandoned when human tragedy strikes, but one that is extremely
unlikely for most victims of the aftermath of the death penalty.
MH
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