Classic American films: Monster – Charlize Theron’s superb portrait of a serial killer
- Theron pulled out all the stops to play Aileen Wuornos, shaving her eyebrows and gaining 14kg in weight
- Most critics call her Academy Award-winning performance the best in her career
In this regular feature series on some of the most talked-about films, we examine the legacy of classics, re-evaluate modern blockbusters, and revisit some of the most memorable lines in film. We continue this week with the 2003 film Monster .
In the early noughties, the names of the three women most integral to Monster (2003) would have meant very little to most people. Today, lead actress Charlize Theron is a major Hollywood star. Writer-director Patty Jenkins ( Wonder Woman , Wonder Woman 1984) is the highest paid female filmmaker of all time. Serial killer Aileen Wuornos, meanwhile, was executed in 2002.
Unavoidably of its time, with cheap lighting and a scuzzy, stonewashed, straight-to-DVD look, Monster resists the usual biopic traps, presenting Wuornos (Theron) in her last months of freedom, rather than trying to cram in her entire life story.
From the opening, which shows her as a teenager flashing her breasts for money, while a dreamy voice-over talks of being “beautiful and rich like the women on TV”, we quickly get the point. This is a woman whose life has been defined/derailed by the expectations/actions of men.
Cut to Wuornos in the present day, sheltering under a bridge in the rain, and contemplating how to spend her last US$5. “I knew I probably given some a**hole a blowjob for it,” she says. “If I killed myself without spending it I basically sucked him off for free.”