The Aerie
So far I'm not impressed.
We're halfway through "Monster's Ball", and I'm unimpressed. Maybe
that's being prejudicial -- and with a movie that touches upon the
topic of racial prejudice I suppose I wouldn't want to do that -- but
I'm not buying a lot of the film.
My spouse is not a "night person," and the equation that describes her
likelihood of falling asleep equals one percent chance for every
minute past nine p.m. The other night we got to the climactic scene in
"Fight Club" (an excellent film, BTW), and moments later she lurched
up and said "What did I miss?" I turned off the set in exasperation.
So tonight we started watching "Monster's Ball" at 7:30, allowing the
children to tend themselves downstairs. Now we're taking a break while
they eat their bedtime snacks of industrially-packaged factory-second
green Macintosh apples covered in 100% non-caramel crystallized
glucose containing red, orange and blue dyes.
These were gifts to them from my mother, and came in formed plastic
shells similar to those used to package compact-flourescent light
bulbs or hairbrushes. When my son took his out of the package the
apple fell right off the stick. Fortunately I noticed that the stick
was covered with a disagreeable looking black substance, and inspected
the apple. Inside the hole I saw a small ring of mold. Taking a knife,
I prepared to core out the moldy spot, only to discover that the only
thing holding the apple together was the 100% non-caramel crystallized
glucose shell. The apple was rotten to the core.
Sorry.
Fortunately his sister's braces prevented her from enjoying her gift,
so he ate her caramel apple instead, and an emotional crisis was
averted. Shortly the children, energized by crystallized glucose, will
be laid in their beds where they will vibrate softly until 1 a.m.
Whereupon my wife and I will resume watching "Monster's Ball."
So far we've just gotten to the rather contrived point where Halle
Berry and Billy Bob Thornton are drinking together and looking at
sketches. It's clear what will happen next: they'll have sex. Then
they'll find out the truth about each other, they'll have an emotional
scene, they'll reunite and live happily ever after.
Or not. It's not really the plot contrivances themselves that bother
me. I mean, it's gotten to the point where I can pretty much
anticipate where the Gratuitous Sex Scene Ten Minutes Into the Film is
about to appear (usually about ten minutes into the film). And maybe
the writers will put an ironic or tragic twist on the usual plot and
have Berry be a murderess, or otherwise cast the film into a dark
spiral.
Whatever the vagaries of the plot, here's the big problem I have: if
you're going to make a movie about a bigoted white man overcoming many
obstacles and falling in love with a black woman... why make it so
easy?
I mean this is Halle Berry for goodness sake. She would give a gay
bigoted white man a hardon. It's supposed to be daring that Hank
Grotowski, played by Billy Bob Thornton would overcome his tortured
past when the reward for doing so is Halle Berry? You want to make
this movie daring? You want to make a REAL movie? Have Billy Bob fall
in love with a woman as black and as overweight as Coronji Calhoun,
the actor who plays her son. And don't make a joke out of it!
Real people fall in love all the time. Real people overcome obstacles
without the advantages of a perfect complexion, enormous boobs, or
grizzled good looks. In the spare, stylized South of Monster's Ball,
the erotic and aesthetic quality of Berry's Letitia Musgrove is almost
absurd.
Instead of letting Grotowski be pulled by his gonads past his bigotry,
fear and anger, give us a 350 pound sweaty black woman, and let their
shared pain draw them together. Let their humanity overcome their
looks. Take the protagonist past his fears, sure, but take the
audience along with him! For a movie that is supposedly about learning
to overcome appearances, it depends all too much on appearance to make
plausible the protagonist's attraction. Where Hank has to overcome his
bigotry to find his heart, the audience in this film is never asked to
move from their initial position that equates beauty with
desirability.
Even as the movie suggests that love doesn't care if you're black or
white, it suggests that love is pretty picky about a woman's
measurements.
So that's my review from halfway through the film. Now I'll go
upstairs and hope to be pleasantly surprised...
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Posted by Albatross at November 8, 2002 12:00 AM