monsters ball

[KLAXXON]

Halle Berry stars in her 'Best Actress' Academy Award-winning roll as the wife of a condemned man on death row, with Billy Bob Thornton as the executioner destined to find a new life and new hope with the condemned man's widow.
Monster's Ball is a film about intersecting lives, in which the characters transform one another in a deeply profound way. But can these two people, drawn together by passion and violence, wrestle their furute from the tangled grip of the past?


Monster's Ball, Marc Forster's follow-up to his digitally shot and experimental Everything Put Together, which made a splash at Sundance Festival two years ago, is a decent, well-intentioned interracial drama, substantially elevated by the performances of Billy Bob Thornton and particularly Halle Berry.

Although marred by a schematic screenplay that bluntly telegraphs its social and humanist messages, the film still manages to tell a compelling love story between a white redneck security guard, who is a product of racist brainwashing, and the black widow of a convict he has just executed. The best marketing hook for this Lions Gate release is Berry's breakthrough performance, which was cited by the National Board of Review and nominated for a Golden Globe, and is also likely to be one of the five Best Actress Oscar nominees on February 12. One of the holiday season's most overrated pictures, probably due to the disappointing mainstream fare surrounding it, Monster's Ball has divided critics, but seems to have found its most appreciate public in the arthouse circuit. In its first four weeks of release, the film, which is being platformed, has grossed $837,244 from 11 screens after four weeks. It is also screening in competition at the Berlin film festival next week.

Co-written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, Monster's Ball belongs to the Hollywood tradition of the socially-conscious melodrama, a genre that has been almost completely reclaimed by independent film-making now that the studios seldom tackle serious, issue-oriented films anymore. In this respect, as an earnest drama that propagates redemption and harmonious co-existence between the races, the film represents a respectable achievement and welcome statement. However, artistically speaking, Monster's Ball leaves a lot to be desired, particularly in the writing department.

Indeed, the film's chief problem is its stereotypical, almost one-dimensional, portrayal of all the white males, who represent three disparate generations of the Grotowski clan in the Deep South. Grandfather Buck (a disappointing Peter Boyle) is a retired corrections officer, who's now hooked to an oxygen tank, spending most of his time at home reading newspapers. Now in his old age, Buck wears his proud racism and unrepentant chauvinism on his sleeves. In broad strokes, it's established that Buck' racism has influenced and even contaminated his entire family. His son Hank (Thornton), who also works as a prison guard, is a bigot who can't even tolerate the sight of his black neighbours playing on his property.

Sonny (Ledger), Hank's son, who also works as a death row guard, is a rebellious youngster who spends his leisure with a local prostitute, engaging in impersonal sex. It's indicative of the entire script that in the first - and weakest - reel, each of the characters is associated with one personality trait or behavioural pattern. Hence, Hank is the kind of guard who throws up before executions take place. Sonny, the most "sensitive" of the three men, lacks the guts that it takes to do his job. Unbeknownst to his grandfather or dad, Sonny befriends a black farmer's young children.

Across town, the audience is introduced to Leticia (Berry) and her obese, candy-addicted teenage son, Tyrell (Calhoun), whom she physically and mentally abuses. Leticia's convicted husband, Lawrence (Combs), is about to be executed in what the guards refer to as a monster's ball, an act that deprives the condemned of a lawyer or preacher. While the films evokes the gloom and doom of prison life, it still suffers in comparison with Tim Robbins' far superior anti-capital punishment drama, Dead Man Walking.

The drama improves once Lawrence is executed and Sonny dies in an accident, which clears the way for a contrived meeting between Hank and Leticia. Although coming from vastly different backgrounds, and subscribing to disparate value systems, their paths fatefully intersect. It's in these scenes that director Forster, who is Swiss-born and American-educated, shows his delicate touch in creating a distinctive social and physical milieu from which his two protagonists experience alienation, seeking a way out of their respective loneliness and oppression. Foster is also adept in the way that he stages an audaciously graphic sex scene between Hank and Leticia, one that's marked by spare dialogue and is carried through gestures and silences.
 
Sophisticated viewers might raise serious doubts about the credibility of the interracial affair, although to Forster and his writers' credit, Monster's Ball is probably meant as a parable of absolution and redemption at a time when American society has never been more sharply polarised along racial and social lines. Whether Monster's Ball represents a major leap forward in terms of a mature cinema of issues and ideas is also debatable for, as mentioned, the film's politics are too blatant and explicit. That said, the burden of history, both contemporary and distant, as it passes from one generation to the next, is highlighted through Leticia and Hank's valiantly heroic effort to break free of their chains and establish their worth as human beings.

The brilliant Billy Bob Thornton has done good work: this season alone, he's also appeared onscreen in the crime comedy, Bandits and the Coen brothers' noir, The Man Who Wasn't There. But the real revelation here is Berry, still best known for her TV portrayal of troubled actress Dorothy Dandridge, for which she won a Golden Globe. In a radical departure to the minor part she played in Warren Beatty's political satire, Bullworth, and the minor, unworthy part she played in the John Travolta vehicle, Swordfish, Berry rises to the occasion and delivers a multi-nuanced breakthrough performance that places her at the front rank of leading ladies.



Corrections Officer Hank Grotowski heads the prison squad supervising Lawrence Musgrove, awaiting execution after 11 years on Death Row. Distressed by his duties, Hank's son is also on the team, while Musgrove's emotionally drained wife Leticia struggles



Way to go, Halle! On one of the too-rare occasions Berry has had an opportunity to show what she can really do (memo to her agent: dangling in chains in Swordfish, not a good idea), she seizes her role as an exhausted woman at the end of her rope with such naked desperation and need that it's hard to watch - and harder to forget. Billy Bob Thornton certainly should also have been in the Oscar stakes, as he is riveting as a man of few words who initially seems unforgivably cold and harsh, but subtly and miraculously evokes understanding and pity.

Reduced to barest basics, this is a prison drama/romance, but it's about many things, all of them to do with compassion, humanity and the need for love. Fathers and sons are a major theme. Widower Hank is the son of an irredeemably selfish, nasty, racist, retired prison guard (Boyle playing the spectacularly horrid old Buck). Hank's sensitive, unloved son (Ledger's effective Sonny) is a third generation prison guard, bullied into the bitter family inheritance and rituals of small, mean, dusty lives.

They are imprisoned as surely as the cop killer sitting on Death Row.The condemned man, Musgrove (Combs doing a smart and impressive volte-face from his cool comedic role in Made), also has a browbeaten son. The bashful, ungainly boy has inherited his father's artistic talent and has eaten himself into obesity on the junk food and chocolate bars that are his only comfort.

As the sole woman to feature (besides a matter-of-fact prostitute who gets both Sonny and Hank's brisk, boorish custom), Berry's weary waitress Leticia is a bravely unflinching portrait of a woman so crushed, she's a drunk, abusive mother, with a palpably agonising need to feel something, anything.

Hank and Leticia would be no computer's dating match in a million years. However, the weight of cares and catastrophe on both of them is what makes it possible that these two, when their paths collide, could so touchingly, vulnerably, and tentatively, try to find their way back to life together.

As is so often the case with emigre directors, German-born, Swiss-raised, N.Y.U. graduate Forster brings an alert eye for specific detail and mood to the American scene. The heavy, stultifying atmosphere of the poor, rural, Southern setting dominates everything. Written by two struggling actors who showed remarkable tenacity and integrity by holding out through six frustrating years of negotiations with studios anxious to soften the script, this is a very adult, very humane drama.



Powerfully affecting, with superb performances that add complexity, depth and feeling to an uncompromising drama. It seems dour on the surface, but is an unsentimental, yet achingly eloquent, affirming story of transformation and hope.




Billy Bob Thornton ... Hank Grotowski
Halle Berry ... Leticia Musgrove
Taylor Simpson ... Lucille
Gabrielle Witcher ... Betty
Heath Ledger ... Sonny Grotowski
Amber Rules ... Vera
Peter Boyle ... Buck Grotowski
Charles Cowan Jr. ... Willie Cooper
Taylor LaGrange ... Darryl Cooper
Mos Def ... Ryrus Cooper
Anthony Bean ... Dappa Smith
Francine Segal ... Georgia Ann Paynes
John McConnell ... Harvey Shoonmaker
Marcus Lyle Brown ... Phil Huggins
Milo Addica ... Tommy Roulaine



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[razzell2]

Thanks for sharing this classic, award winning film.
Of course, that is the only reason I want this one in my collection.
It has nothing to do with Halle Barre, or the nude sex scene she does in it.
Nothing to do with that.
Not at all.

Thanks Klaxxon!