We were silent today in the theatre after Monster. Rosemarie and I sat while the credits rolled by, dully staring at the scrolling lists of people we don't know and most likely never will, people who had some part in the making of the film. I was greatly moved, on the edge, not quite falling over. It had been a tossup whether to see Monster or The Company; we finally had decided to put off the ballet film so as to see it with our daughter next weekend.
I hadn't mentioned my apprehensions about Monster, but they were there. The last one-word title film I'd seen was Gus Van Sant's Elephant. I had found it awkward, vacuous, and without significance, a film that prided itself in saying nothing of any substance about its subject. It seemed almost to propagate the moral disease, the anomie, that infected its two protagonists.
I had read some reviews of Monster, seen a few advance clips, encountered strong recommendations from a friend in Toronto whose film judgement I am learning to trust. But I was still doubtful: yeah, sure, it's going to be one of those “sympathy for the devil” films. It'll go all schmalzy and googly-eyed about a serial killer, explaining about her traumatic childhood and shit like that.
So now I'm sitting in the theatre watching the final credits rolling up the screen, and I don't want to stand up. I don't want to walk out into the sunlight and have to refocus my mind on dumbshit things like driving home, or going for coffee, or anything else. I want to continue contemplating, instead, the tragedy of Aileen Wuornos.
“Bruce Dern.” Rosemarie said. “I was wondering who the old guy was.”
“Geez, I haven't seen Dern in decades.”
Rosemarie and I have seen a lot of films. We can estimate each other's responses pretty accurately, without words. When we saw The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's, years ago, we were speechless the whole drive home. This afternoon we were talking by the time we left the theatre, but we weren't saying much more than wo or wow or your toronto friend was right, and there was a lot of silence in between even this much.
“I was afraid it would be sentimental,” I said as we reached the car, “but here I am near tears.”
“Me too,” said Rosemarie.
“But I'm not sympathetic to Aileen,” I said. “She's a repulsive toad. Why am I almost crying?”
“Well...” said Rosemarie, and stopped. I looked over at her. “...would you cry at the end of Macbeth?”
“Hm. I actually did once,” I said.
“Was he a sympathetic character?” she said.
“No. Of course not. He's a monster.”
“And the missus too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why did you cry?”
I thought about that for a while. Rosemarie left the question hanging. She quit explaining me to myself a long time ago.
“Hell of a performance,” I said after a while.
“Yes,” said Rosemarie. “The other girl too.”
“Christiana Ricci?”
“Was that her name? Yeah, her.”
“One of the reviewers trashed her.”
“Damn critics. That was a tough role.”
“Theron was over the top. That's a performance to learn from. Even committing the murders, it was like you were seeing into her soul right at that moment. Looking into hell itself. Watching a performance like that – and understanding it – should be worth two years of graduate study in psychology.”
“Yeah. I saw people like that – who had committed murder – when I was doing my nursing study at the state mental hospital.”
“Mm. The woman had no inner life. Everything she was, she was on the surface. I mean you could really see everything on her face, from moment to moment.”
“That level of acting is beyond technical. This isn't something Meryl Streep could do. This is basic insight into a character.”
We spent some time remembering Sophie's Choice, and what Meryl Streep did and didn't do in that film. We fell silent again for a while.
I said “You know the first moment when I almost lost it? It was when she was trying to turn a new leaf and get a regular job. It's like, with every word out of her mouth I'm saying don't be so stupid, you're deluding yourself, how can you be so invincibly dumb and still believe in yourself, and finally I'm crying for her because she won't wise up and she thinks that's what following your dream means. At that moment she's Macbeth believing the witches. She's Quixote. The moment demands, really, that we laugh, not cry.”
“But we cry.”
“We cry. Right.”
“Interesting thing,” said Rosemarie a few minutes later. “The film isn't sympathetic at all, is it.”
“No. I was afraid the director would be making all sorts of excuses for Aileen. She didn't.”
“She?”
“Yeah. Didn't you notice? The director was a woman.”
“Wow. Who? Not that awful one from The Piano.”
“No. Somebody I never heard of named Patty Jenkins. I'll google for the name when we get home.”
“Mm. No excuses. Aileen makes excuses for herself but the director doesn't believe them and doesn't expect us to.”
“Uh-huh. At the first murder you have to sympathize with Aileen – that's self-defense. But then by degrees the story says she's going over the line, and then towards the end people – even Selby – pull back sort of horrified at what they know or suspect Aileen has been doing. This is the sort of social action that collectively defines what a moral boundary is: what the people around you, when you've done something wicked like this, recoil from understanding. When they look at you with horror in their eyes. Like when the greek chorus realizes that Oedipus has married his mother. I saw that happening with Selby even.”
“Yeah. I did too. And with Thomas.”
“The Bruce Dern character? Yeah. I think I did. But I wasn't sure, there at the end. Was he part of the group taking her into custody or was he trying to warn her to get out of there. I don't know.”
“There was a scene a few moments earlier where he got a look in his eye like: I know this woman is the murderer, and he went out of the room or the bar real quick.”
“We'll have to see it again.”
Anyway, there you have it. This is a superb film. This is a strong, thoughtful, reflective film. It is a contribution to discussion of social and moral values at a level that most films – even serious ones – can't imagine and don't aspire to. Charlize Theron's performance sets new standards for insight and integrity; such as I encounter only a few times in a decade. The entire film is strong: the supporting roles, the script, the editing.
But what in blazes was Van Sant trying to accomplish with Elephant? I'm still wondering about that. Stay tuned.
9:46:40 PM 
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