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MONSTER’S
BALL
5/10
USA
2001 : Marc Forster : 111 mins
The
few intrepid viewers fortunate enough to catch Marc Forster’s barely-released
last picture – the flawed but fascinating Everything
Put Together – would have been keen to catch his Hollywood breakthrough,
Monster’s Ball, especially if they’d read Variety’s rave
which said it was directed with the most ‘poetic sensibility’ in an American
film since The Thin Red Line. While the film itself hardly justify
such extravagant comparisons, Forster is clearly developing into a confident,
skilled creator of moods and evocative images. His contributions, and
those of star Billy Bob Thornton, are easily the most distinguished things
about the film – surprisingly (or perhaps not) the two elements that let
it down are the ones that have been cited for Academy Awards: Halle Berry’s
“against type” performance and, worst of all, the rickety ragbag of a
script by Milo Addica and Will Rokos.
The
screenplay’s Oscar nomination is presumably a result of it having passed
through so many sets of Hollywood hands over the past few years – this
was famously one of the great unfilmed scripts, one which big names
like Oliver Stone were supposedly always on the verge of making. If true,
this says more about the current state of moviemaking than about the script
itself, which is an increasingly ludicrous series of melodramatic incidents
in search of a narrative. The characters played by Thornton (as a taciturn
death row guard) and Berry (as the widow of an executed prisoner) are
brought together after suffering various family tragedies and calamities,
and while they do make an intriguing, convincing, volatile couple
in the second half of the movie, the overwrought shenanigans needed to
get them there are more than many viewers will be able to bear.
While
Forster shows a remarkable skill with investing things with significance
– spaces, furniture, rooms, clothes, neon – he’s still got his rough edges,
and this is most evident in his handling of Berry. It’s an obvious change-of-pace
showcase for the glamorous star, but she’s fatally overindulged – most
disastrously in the borderline-embarrassing scene where her character
gets drunk and sentimental and starts blabbing on about a ‘red gumball’,
and Forster seems to have forgotten how to say ‘cut’. Or perhaps he’s
trying desperate means to distract us from the characterisations’ general
patchiness – Thornton keeps going to a neon-lit diner where he habitually
asks for chocolate ice cream and a plastic spoon to eat it with.
Presumably something to do with his preference of keeping life at a slight
remove, but perhaps not. And, as with the similarly grief-laden In
The Bedroom, the title is distractingly messy – there’s a very
brief mention of a ‘monster’s ball’ being something to do with a prisoner
who’s executed without clergy being present, but in the film itself it
seems to involve the doomed man (nice, no-nonsense turn from rap magnate
Sean Combs) being served a trifle.
For
all these reservations, there are some great things here: the shatteringly
unexpected early exit of someone you presume is going to be a major figure;
everything involving Peter Boyle, who contributes one of his trademark
pitch-perfect character turns as Thornton’s aged, racist father; the unexpected
note of subtlety that ends the picture on as strong a note as it begins
- those remarkable opening titles showing Thornton in ambiguous split-screen,
sleeping in bed and driving his car. They’re enough to convince us we’re
in for a mature, powerful, complex tragedy – what we end up with does
the job, just about, but it isn’t the real thing. To use the movie’s own
terms, it’s a very plastic kind of spoon.
11th
March 2002
(seen 8th February, Cinemaxx Berlin – Berlin
Film Festival)
This film
appeared in the Fipresci Selection 2001-2002 : click
here for full list
by Neil
Young
Buy Monster's Ball on DVD
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