Supporting Victims: Joel Fuernsinn, Jeff Hunt, Sean Marston
One of the characters in the movie sketches
portraits of people because, he says, "Only a human can really draw a
picture of another human." Monster's Ball gives us two human
portraits in painful, vivid, rough-lined, strokes. Billy Bob Thornton plays one
of the humans; Hank Grotowski - a white, middle-aged, racist, widowed prison
guard living in the shadow of a tyrannical father. Halle Berry plays the other
humans; Leticia Musgrove - a young, black, single-mother, struggling to meet
rent payments as a waitress while struggling with an obese son. Their separate
lives are brought together with the execution of Leticia's husband and a series
of tragedies.
This movie takes place on a relatively small stage in the world with some very
small players. There's nothing glamorous about the characters or the situations.
When we first meet them, the characters are somewhat distasteful people. Hank
fires a shotgun into the air to run two black kids off of his property and to
keep them from visiting his son Sonny (Heath Ledger). Leticia shows no emotion
when visiting her ex-husband on Death Row and lashes out and beats her son for
being overweight and for threatening to grow up to be a failure like his father.
Through the story and guided by the acting talents of Thornton and Berry, we
grow to understand that these are two basically good people trapped somewhat by
circumstance and by character. The rest of the movie deals with their personal
growth and how they learn to move on with their lives.
The director, Marc Forster, uses a number of visual techniques that give the
film a very rough-edged and personal look. Very often the scenes and faces are
shot with blurring at the edges. In one scene, we see Leticia helping a customer
and the camera slowly pulls back away from her and through the window to show us
the reflection of Hank staring at her, struggling to deal with a lifetime of
misguided convictions. Other scenes have a very hard and blunt edge about them.
Nothing is given the Hollywood romantic pixie dust here - the love scenes are
about satisfying lust and need, the death scenes are matter of fact and
mercifully short, and the grief and sorrow from events both past and present
fill the rooms like shadows. At the end of the movie, we're not only left
knowing that we have finished this particular chapter of the lives of these
characters but feeling also that we have seen the lives of two real people.
I give Monster's Ball an 8 out of 10. This is not a movie that you see to be
entertained and cheered as its subject matter is rather grim and is presented
relentlessly. It's a movie that displays some excellent character development
and storytelling. I greatly enjoyed watching Thornton and Berry interact on the
screen. If anything, this is a kind of movie that you watch to balance against
the heavily-promoted pictures that Hollywood makes; this is a sketch of two
people, drawn by humans.
