ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Copyright  © 2002  by Michael Segers,  All rights reserved 

       Somehow, over the years the expression “adult movie” has taken on a decidedly unpleasant connotation.  Let it be known that at last, with Monster’s Ball  we have (at the very end of 2001, but it won’t be widely released until 2002) a decidedly adult film in all the best possible senses of those words.  I can’t remember when I’ve seen a film with four such consistently strong performances, performances inspired by a script that is constantly full of surprises, not in a mechanical, over-the-top way, but as an inevitable unfolding of events in lives lived beyond inevitability. 

     For all its brutal realities, Monster’s Ball is a subtle glimpse of just what filmmaking can be.  I’ll even say, should be.  There are so many possibilities for stereotypes, for predictability, in this tale of a white racist prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) attracted to a black woman (Halle Berry) whose husband (Sean “Puffy” Combs, a real surprise) he has recently executed that I just kept waiting for a disaster which never happened. 

     From the detailed antiseptic Death Row, where Hank, like his father Buck (Peter Boyle) before him, now with his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), to the broken down, womanless house where the three men live (but, somehow, not together), the film catches the quiet desperation of broken lives. I wondered whether the death penalty so dehumanized these men who are charged with inflicting it or whether it appealed to them. Along the way, this film reflects our ongoing fascination with the death penalty; consider The Man Who Wasn't There (2001),  Dancer in the Dark (2000) and The Green Mile (1999).

     The title, by the way, refers to a custom that Hank mentions of having a party for the condemned man the night before his execution.   No matter what one can say about Hank, he has a grudging respect for the protocol of execution.  When his son cannot follow that protocol, a terrible series of events begins that leads to the death of Sonny and to Hank quitting his job. 

     Another family, that of the executed man, his wife Leticia (Berry) and their son (Coronji Calhoun), mirrors the horrors of Hank’s family.   Two flawed and grieving people, Leticia and Hank, happen to meet, and the terrible stories of their two families (I wish I could say more without giving away things) overlap.  Although I feel that Thornton’s work in The Man Who Wasn’t There was more of a stretch for him, what he accomplishes in this film is nothing to be ashamed of.  All four of the main actors—as well as Ledger and Calhoun in exquisitely realized minor roles—create stunning characterizations as well as an ensemble as distinctive for its tension as for its cohesion.

     In the script of Monster’s Ball,  writers Milo Addica and Will Rokos somehow create spaces for the actors to do their work, unfettered by words.   Perhaps you need to know that there are two sex scenes in this film, but they are two of the saddest scenes I’ve ever seen in a film.  One, near the beginning, is so abrupt that some people in the theater with me laughed, but as the film unwinds, it is given poignancy as a stark emblem of Sonny’s emptiness and lovelessness.  The other, between Berry and Thornton is almost too long, as the two deeply wounded characters explore each other’s psyches through their bodies.  The scene ultimately is about despair, not titillation.  But, I can’t help but wonder if our society would deal with a similar scene between, say, Samuel L. Jackson and Meg Ryan, as I reflect on the sad suggestions about race and sex in this film.

      I felt almost physical discomfort at times in this film, and I don’t mean the discomfort of squirming through a boring film.  I just wanted these people to quit hurting so badly.  Director Marc Foster has taken a real monster in hand and perhaps hasn’t tamed it so much as restrained it, keeping its strange, sad energy under control.    

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