Movie Review: Monster's Ball

I saw Monster’s Ball recently, after having avoided it since it came out five or six years ago. My hesitation had been caused by a general distaste for “regional” films, especially “Southern” ones; my desire to hold onto a shred of hope that Halle Berry had won her Oscar through talent, not politics, and my belief that seeing the movie would kill that hope; my lack of respect for the Oscars, even in the case that they do reward talent; and the reviews I had heard or read from others who criticized the movie, mainly for being gratuitously explicit.

Monster’s Ball proved each of my reasons for delay meaningless. The fact that the movie is set in the South does not make it either the indictment or glorification of Southern culture that so many annoying films are. Halle Berry did an excellent job in her role, and though I still have no respect for the Oscars, I do not fault the Academy for picking her. As for the objection that the movie was too full of sex and not enough substance, this view can only be held by those whose purpose in watching a movie is to police its content for a moral message—and that is not the point of this movie.

In some ways, this film could be considered a part of the recently popular “theme of significance” drama genre, the edges of which are described by The Butterfly Effect or Sliding Doors (one small circumstance alters the rest of one’s life), Garden State (apathy gives way to empathy), Little Miss Sunshine or Napoleon Dynamite (relatively unimportant events lead to an apparent, but also meaningless, resolution). The main characters of Monster’s Ball experience apparently meaningless tragedies in their lives—meaningless because they are unexplained, because they did not have to happen, or because they are the results of small, discrete actions that the characters had taken, compounded over years.

The two main characters' reactions to the deaths in the film, and in some cases the deaths themselves—I would argue that there are, metaphorically, four, including Hank’s father—are the result of a misapprehension or inability to make direct contact with the world on the parts of Hank and Leticia. Hank is unable to love his son, and is unable to realize that he does not, until confronted; as Hank wakes up to the reality of how he functions in the world, he realizes that he is not what he had assumed himself to be. He cannot continue as a corrections officer. He cannot continue to support his harsh, racist father. Leticia does not seem to be so divorced from her feelings, but she distracts herself from her husband’s execution (with alcohol), and she expresses her anxieties for her son through nagging about his weight. Their indirect approaches to dealing with themselves and the contents of their lives connects this movie to others that deal with questions of significance, and specifically the significance of everyday life.

But there Monster’s Ball departs from the thematic genre of in/significance. Things happen in this film—big things—and they happen unexpectedly. The death of Sonny is emphatic and startling because it is unexpected; the death of Leticia’s son is the same, though not to the same degree. The sheer body count of this movie vaults it from quotidian drama to the level of tragedy.

And yet, the tragedy does not devolve into a City of Angels melodrama, precisely because of its grounding in the everyday, insignificant details of life. Each decision Hank or Leticia makes is both ordinary and deeply rooted in their emotional realities; this is what makes the depiction of intimacy necessary and not gratuitous. They encounter one another on a visceral level—a painful one, reinforced by hard edit cuts instead of the typical soft-focus lens of bittersweet nostalgia—almost exclusively in these scenes. The rest of the time, they appear to be ordinary people attempting to manage ordinary circumstances.

As well they should. Death is both ordinary and traumatic. Any depiction of this level of loss should admit that.

The ultimate triumph of Monster’s Ball on this count can be credited to its score, which refuses to add a single falsely cheerful note. Most composers would emphasize triumph over adversity through grand, sweeping runs and excessive instrumentation. (Cue characters looking to the horizon, where dawn is breaking, “looking to a new day”…ugh.) Instead of this, the three collaborative composers of the Monster’s Ball score wrote music that seems to come up through the middle of a scene, such that the viewer accepts its effect as a natural extension of the story—as another method, even, of story-telling. It conveys a sense of exploration rather than resolve—that hollow resolve of romantic comedies attempting to tie everything into a “happily ever after”—and, in its floating above the action of the film, sympathizes with the viewer rather than the actors. The gentle, coming-alongside nature of the music pulls the viewer into a film that might otherwise have been off-puttingly difficult to watch.

In the end, Monster’s Ball is a tragedy that succeeds in rising above the mawkish and the mundane, both. Despite the number of deaths and their attendant complications, and despite the quotidian focus of the characters’ (especially Hank’s) transformation, despite the difficulty of the material at hand, Monster’s Ball artfully and sensitively portrays what feels like a true story.