‘Monster’

Directed by Patty Jenkins

Starring Charlize Theron Christina Ricci

Newmarket

Rated R

111 mins

Grade: B

It’s a strange reverse form of narcissism – the actor who gets ugly for their art. In Hollywood, more than anywhere, a person’s primary instrument is their looks, and it can be both a boon and a limitation to the wannabe serious actor. Tom Cruise disfigured his face with latex scars and a Phantom of the Opera mask in “Vanilla Sky;” Brad Pitt went all gnarly and snaggle-toothed in “Fight Club.” The perverse backfire, though, of such stunts is that by erasing their looks, these actors seem even more vain than usual. It’s as if they’re saying, “Hey, this is what I’m willing to do for your entertainment.”

Nicole Kidman, with her pristine elegant beauty, gave sharper, more commanding performances looking like herself in “The Others” and “Moulin Rouge” than she did by playing Virginia Woolf in that didactic bit of feminist chick-lit, “The Hours.” There, her performance seemed to be centered on that blobby prosthetic nose.

Charlize Theron has a similar curse to Kidman. She’s a statuesque, Amazonian-blonde with the angelic face of a good-girl supermodel, but for the true-to-life serial killer drama “Monster,” Theron gained 30 pounds, let her complexion mottle into the ruddy skin of a lifelong alcoholic and grew hair so straw-like it could have been plucked from a scarecrow. It’s a startling physical transformation, since we can barely see Theron, but for her eyes, yet the magic is that the transformation isn’t just physical. Theron digs deep into the wounded psyche of Aileen Wuornos, the woman to be declared America’s first female serial killer by a typically hyperbolic media in the late 80s (she was executed in 2002), so much so that her performance transcends the gimmickry of her appearance. Her transformation isn’t just physical, but mental too.

Wuornos was a destitute, sometimes homeless prostitute thumbing her way along Florida’s highways throughout the 1980s. A victim of childhood abuse and incest, she made her way through life beaten and battered by circumstance, until she met Selby Wall, a lesbian who offered her the hope of love, adoration and redemption in her life. But when she’s raped by a John and forced to kill him in self-defense, it’s as if a lifetime of resentment has come bursting to the surface. Wuornos begins to kill her Johns, but it’s not out of simple bloodlust. It’s out of the desire to feel alive, to feel as if though she has control of her own life. Wuornos kills out of the desire to be important.

“Monster” is a good movie posing as a great one, but it has a feral emotional pull. Some will accuse the movie of humanizing Wuornos – and that it does, deftly – but will any of those critics see the sense of desperation at the film’s core, the way Wuornos was hurtling toward the abyss?

Watching “Monster” may reminded one of “Boys Don’t Cry” the terrific 1999 drama about Brandon Teena, a transgender man (born Teena Brandon) who was raped and murdered by former friends when they found out he was really a she. That was a better film than this, with a galvanizing humanity that lingered far more than it does here, but both films share the same uneasy evocations of gender tyranny. In both films, the central characters are women betrayed by the men in their lives (Wuornos is hurt early on by an abusive father) and both pay the price for that betrayal: Teena is brutally killed by her so-called friends; Wuornos finds something akin to empowerment, but only by slipping down the rabbit hole of self-deception and dehumanization.

The movie would have held more of a grip had the director, Patty Jenkins, given the movie less of a schematic feel. At nearly two hours, “Monster” feels a bit repetitive, as a loop of angrily dramatic scenes of a dissolute Wuornos raging at the injustice of the world. Jenkins knows how to craft a scenes in a way that makes it so that each one evokes the maximum sadness possible, but what she doesn’t quite do is string them together into a cohesive whole. It hardly helps matters that Jenkins has the winking, hipster heavy-handedness that plagues too many independent filmmakers. Scoring the first romantic kiss between Wuornos and Wall (played, with a wide-eyed girlish innocence, by Christina Ricci) to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” smacks, not of poignancy, but of a leaden, smirking irony out of place in the context of the film. Nor does Jenkins stop to take the time to delve into Wuornos’ past; her childhood is glossed over in order to get to the romance and path to murder.

But the real talking piece of “Monster” isn’t Jenkins’ indie-school direction, but Theron’s mesmeric performance. The actress throws her body around as though it were a sack of potatoes, talks in a jutting, angry drawl and stares out through accusatory eyes that convey a mixture of despair, fearfulness and weariness. Theron doesn’t just look like Wuornos, but becomes her and it’s a display of acting as bravura as any. It turns “Monster” into more than a halfway decent bit of cinematic dramatization. Theron rivets your attention to the screen.