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Monster's Ball teaches some new steps in the Southern family drama shuffle
by Zak Weisfeld
Hank Grotowski is not your friend. Or anyone's for that matter—even his own. Hank is Bogart staggering into Tennessee Williams. He wears so little on his sleeve he's forgotten he even has them. The only thing Hank does have, between his morning vomit and his evening chocolate ice cream, is his professionalism. And the men whom he helps to the execution chamber in his job as a prison guard seem to appreciate it. His son, however, does not.
So we are not surprised to see the tension between them explode, literally, into heartbreak and tragedy. But Monster's Ball has just begun. The death of Hank's son is only the first trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet of Southern melodrama. Because Hank is not merely the semi-unwilling executioner of his own son, but the actual executioner of Leticia Musgrove's husband. And do we need to mention that he is also the man who helps Leticia grieve over the death of her son. Yes, death stalks the homes and diners of this unnamed Southern town. As do racism, desperation and brutality.
Of course we have come to expect that much of any family drama set in the deep South. What we have not come to expect is the honesty and almost shocking lack of sentimentality that keeps Monster's Ball from collapsing into soap opera or farce, though it is a fine line and one that Monster's Ball walks with the grim grace of a man in the tiled corridor that leads to the electric chair. A grace that is wonderfully expressed in the exchange between Hank and the operator of a nursing home that will soon accept Hank's troglodytic father:
"You must love your father very much," says the kindly manager of the home.
"No, I don't," says Hank, "But he's my father. So there it is."
As Hank drives away there is many a dry eye in the house.
But it isn't just the quiet, elegant script by Milo Addica and Will Rokos that keeps Monster's Ball so nimbly balanced. Both Halle Berry as Leticia Musgrove and Billy Bob Thornton as Hank Grotowski give performances that should keep Russell Crowe and Sissy Spacek biting their nails on Oscar night.
Of the two, Berry's is the most daring and the most affecting. The first hurdle Berry has to overcome in taking on a role like that of the broke, put-down, single mother Leticia Musgrove is her own physical beauty. At first glance Berry is too thin, too pretty and too glamorous to get under the skin of a woman whose life revolves around a husband on death row, an obese child and a job at a diner. But her performance is so unflinching and so revealing that we don't have to imagine her pain and her vulnerability—we are actually embarrassed by it. Her neediness and her anger are so palpable that we can accept the strange path down which they send her. A path that leads, with a few twists and turns, to Hank Grotowski.
Unlike Berry, Billy Bob Thornton is almost too obvious a choice to play repressed, second-generation, racist prison guard Hank Grotowski. Thornton responds to the challenge by barely playing him at all. Hank is a man who, at least until very late in the film, things happen to. Until he meets Leticia, Hank watches blankly through an execution, a threat of murder and a suicide. His only emotion is anger and it comes when his son, Sonny, botches a man's last walk. And when it comes, it's wild and overwhelming. We can see why he buries it so deep.
Monster's Ball is stuffed with fine, understated performances. Peter Boyle plays the patriarch of the Grotowski clan like a parody of his popular television role—a kind of Southern Everybody Hates Raymond. Even Sean "P-Diddy" Combs, as Leticia's soon to be executed husband, plays it straight and quiet—something few of us thought him capable of.
Some of the welcome understatement of the acting may be credited to director Marc Forster. A native of Switzerland, a country not known for its gratuitous displays of emotion, Forster keeps Monster's Ball as tight and quiet as a numbered bank account. His eschewal of the close-up, Hollywood's most powerful tool of emotional manipulation, in favor of medium and wide shots keeps the pain and passion of Monster's Ball at a distance. But by keeping the camera still and shooting across rooms or through windows, we are given an eerie, unsettling feeling of voyeurism. It's a powerful combination—and one that, when the tension does boil over, makes it all the more shocking.
It also makes Monster's Ball surprising ending one of those rare movie moments that is truly worth savoring. Monster's Ball is not an easy or fun movie—but it is a very good one.
February 7, 2001 * Vol. 12, No. 6
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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