Monster’s Ball
With Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger, Sean Combs, Mos Def, and Coronji Calhoun.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ultimately this picture is about guilt and absolution, and if it were simply a Hollywood movie without any art trimmings it might try to figure out some way to give us the absolution without any guilt. Someone once remarked that Hollywood gives us an uncrucified Christ, and Monster’s Ball comes pretty close to giving us a comparable sleight of hand, because most of the guilt it portrays turns out to be inherited.
Kael’s 1961 essay suggested “that the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood ‘product,’ finding wish-fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.” Her main example was Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour–at the time a French-Japanese production mixing an interracial love story with reflections about the atomic bomb and France during the occupation could still command mainstream attention–though she also included a couple of Hollywood art movies, The Misfits and 12 Angry Men, in her abbreviated survey. Nowadays domestic art movies get more mainstream attention, and foreign art movies get considerably less, so it’s highly doubtful that a foreign masterpiece could become as fashionable as Hiroshima, mon amour was four decades ago.
Of course Buck has been living inside a cave–a cave that this movie has constructed piece by piece. It’s a cave that pointedly excludes as many traces of society as possible, ascribing racism strictly to individuals and their own twisted orneriness–the same orneriness, we’re expected to conclude, that led Hank’s mother and later Sonny to commit suicide–and assigning responsibility for capital punishment and even the desire for it mainly to the people being executed. We’re never told what Leticia’s husband’s crime was, but no matter. He accepts the judgment that he’s worthless and deserves to be exterminated, silencing any of our objections before we can raise them. And though this movie shows us in graphic, horrifying detail the process of electrocuting a prisoner–which is entirely to its credit–we’re discouraged from speculating even a little about what led to the sentence.
