Monster's Ball

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Raw and Real: Monster’s Ball
by Christian De Matteo

Super

About three weeks have passed since I saw Monster’s Ball, only a few days after Halle Berry’s acceptance speech sobfest. I’d been wanting to see it, and had almost been turned off by her self-important political droolings, but went regardless. Now, I can’t get it out of my head. In a year when the Oscars went above and beyond to tick me off with every single award decision they made, this one they nailed on the head. Not one of the other winners that horrible night, could claim one iota of right to their little gold man, compared to Halle Berry. She was astounding.

But… the entire movie was astounding, and the Oscars, more in character, were highly remiss in not nominating the director, Billy Bob Thornton, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger and the screenplay for Oscars… and having the film win them.

I am not normally a fan of weepers, not because I am too manly— I’ll tear up if a movie is genuinely sad— but most “tearjerkers” are trite, cheap attempts to tug at your heartstrings using the lowest common denominator. Want an example? A child’s death. Of course you’re going to cry when a child dies, that takes no particular writing or acting ability. In fact, it takes talent to make people not sob up when that happens. Wait a minute, many of you are thinking right now, there is a child death in Monster’s Ball! Yes, there is, and the film so brilliantly conveys the jumble of emotions at the moment in time that you don’t automatically bawl, but instead react much like Berry’s character and going into a bit of traumatic shock.

And this is the brilliance of the film: The viewer is allowed to be separate from nothing that happens to the characters. Directed to be painfully claustrophobic, every single shot framed and walled in in some way, director Marc Forster closes you into this world the characters live in, a world they cannot escape from and informs you that, for the next two hours you cannot escape either. And when you leave the theater, the film is also asking, have even escaped then? Or is this just life?

There is nothing unrealistic here, nothing preposterous and nothing that isn’t completely and totally human. And that is the very basis of the film: The human condition. The film gives us a handful of completely different human beings, in completely different places and positions in their lives, nothing contrived like a rich man and a poor woman, but normal, average people whose lives are vastly different just because they are different people. Billy Bob Thornton, one of the greatest actors we have now (Bandits, The Man who Wasn’t There), plays a corrections officer who is the leader of the team of guards who walk deathrow inmates to the chair, or to the “Monster’s Ball.” He carries around a familial discomfort with other races and lives a sad, uncomfortable life. His son, wonderfully played by Heath Ledger, is his opposite, but miserable by association with a world he was not build for. He is passionate and accepting of everyone, might even have a bit of the poet spirit in him, but works with his dad and lives in a house that doesn’t fit his personality at all. One of the most powerful performances of the film is his. Peter Boyle is Billy Bob’s father, an ornery, sickly old man who is the albatross around Billy Bob’s neck. Halle Berry is a poor black woman whose husband (played by Sean Combs in a fine turn as an actor) is one of the deathrow inmates Thornton has had to walk to the chair. With a few very good side characters, this is the cast and so it begins.

Nothing is handed to you at all. Forster directs so incredibly subtlety that every bit of information must be gleaned from the film. The script doesn’t even allow you easy access as to who is whose father or son, eventually this just becomes clear. A day later, driving to work, I figured out the last question I still had about the film, realizing the answer lay only in a single image that had shown twice upon the screen.

One of the things I most loved about the movie was the starkly real approach it takes to human sexual relations. The film covers every type of sex, loveless and mechanical, desperate and needy, passionate and lust driven and truly selfless and giving sex. It uses sex as a metaphor for human needs, because what is a more basic and animal need for humans. Everything eventually comes back to sex, no matter how “civilized and sophisticated” we think we may have become, sex is still at the basis of most things, good and bad, and Monster’ s Ball uses it perfectly.

Date movie? Maybe. The movie is unrelentingly depressing for the entire middle of the film. And because it is not Hollywood fluff, it genuinely hurts, the kind of hurt that doesn’t get chased away by the credits. And it’s realistic, brutally so. Don’t expect a Hollywood ending on this one, but don’t expect anything else either. This, really, is the best way to go into the film: Just go in blind, sit down, and let the film suck you in. It’s well worth it.

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Monster’s Ball
by Joseph De Matteo

Super

To the movie in a moment.

Yes, Halle Berry is a painfully attractive woman. She’s beautiful and has a perfect body, much of which you’ll see in the most provocative way in this film. What was going through Billy Bob Thornton’s head during the filming of that love scene, I wonder? “ …Gees, I forgot to pick up my gray suit at the cleaners.” “Damn, did I leave the iron on?” He might as well have been thinking those things, because after the first minute, you’ll see nothing but Halle Berry. I’ll betcha.

Maybe this scene is so remarkable to me because my taste in movies doesn’t expose me to love making scenes like this. To me heavy petting in a movie is when the protagonist is has just found his misplaced 9mm. Or Antonio Banderas lovingly hefting the sword he just sharpened. But here’s my real question.

Does Halle Berry have a big tattoo or is it a large birthmark. It’s at the panty line from the small of her back going down and over her right cheek. At first I thought it was a shadow. But by the 18^th viewing, eyes pressed tight against the screen, and just before the screen fogged over, I thought is was a tattoo.

Like maybe it was a bird and I was just seeing one wing and another was over her left cheek. After a few more watchings I convinced myself it was the Phoenix. But then I thought, why would a beautiful woman have a Phoenix rising out of her butt? Not a very sexy image.

Or it could be an advertisement, part of one of those new ad campaigns where they have cops sharing a box of Dunkin' Donuts, or there’s a bottle of Busch beer on a kitchen table, or a package of Wonder Bread on the counter.

Maybe they had planned to do that part of the lovemaking scene in slow motion. You know that part that has her leaning over the couch with her back to Billy Bob, he’s taking off her clothes and she’s rubbing her chest and face into the couch pillows and moaning. They could switch to the TV that would be showing a car commercial for one of those sexy sports cars. “Hey,” I screamed, “it’s not a Phoenix, it’s a Thunderbird.” Sure they could do that whole metaphor thing with a red Thunderbird convertible going over hills shaped like buttocks, racing in and out of tunnels. Then, right at the climax the driver’s hat could fly off.

“Any time you’re ready, CB.” (Evander Childs High School, 1962.)

I’m certainly glad they didn’t do it that way.

The sponsor probably pulled out at the last minute, not wanting to drop the load of money the spot would cost. So they blurred up the logo they had tattooed on her butt, and ran the film fast instead of slow.

Frustrated, you can just imagine how frustrated I was when on my 37^th viewing I got around to the birthmark theory. If it is a birthmark I can see the glee in the eyes of every woman in America standing in her room, with her mirrors at just the right angle, so she can see…what she looks like from behind, and saying to herself, “Yeah, but Halle Berry has a big dark birthmark on her rump.”

Of course her husband, nailed to reality is saying, “So what! Give me a night with that woman. PLEASE!”

It’s funny, but I have no memory of the rest of that movie. There were some other people in it. A not so young Frankenstein, I think.

No, wait, I do remember. Billy Bob Thornton once again proves himself one of best in his profession. He’s played a wide range of characters, and does them all extremely well. Hank Grotowski is no exception. Even though he’s played a number of parts where the character is a quiet man but one who is capable of extreme actions, as does Hank, he always gets you rapped up in to the character you’re watching to the exclusion of even Billy Bob Thornton.

Peter Boyle, Young Frankenstein, in the Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks classic B & W horror spoof, did an excellent job as the sickly, retired father. Heath Ledger did a fine job, as did Sean Combs and Coronji Calhoun.

This is one deep and moving film. It got me right there in the center of my being. I related to each character and what they were going through. It’s not contrived or hokey or exploitive…it’s just pure drama. I believed these people; I understood their choices and I clearly saw what life was doing to them. I also recognized the trade offs they made in order to find relief from the onslaught of life.

Monster’s Ball is a deeply personal look at a number of people. Each character is a real person, with a depth that is miles long. Their homes and the landscape, the vehicles, are all props that you may or may not notice. But on the face and in the body of each character you will plainly see each the creators every moment of their lives made at impact.

Applause to each of the actors.

Hats off to Marc Forster.

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Awards & Nominations: IMdb

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Monster's Ball

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The Rumor Mill & Trivia Section: IMdb

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Trivia Section: IMdb