‘All I wanna hear is dirt hit that box…’
It’s funny how one performance can make or break a movie star’s career. Monster’s Ball turned Halle Berry into a household name overnight (helped in no small part by the fact that it also saw her become the first black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress). That was in 2001. In 2005, Berry collected another award. This time, however, it was a Razzie for her much-maligned performance in Catwoman. Easy come, easy go. Anyway, she really is phenomenal here…
What a concept we have on our hands in Marc Foster’s Monster’s Ball. Actors-turned-writers Milo Addica and Will Rokos developed this twisted love story that sees Billy Bob Thornton’s racist corrections officer Hank fall for Berry’s grieving widow, Leticia. The twist is that Leticia’s husband was executed on death row by Hank and his fellow officers. In a delicious example of dramatic irony, the audience knows who these characters are to each other early on in the film but the characters themselves do not. Elsewhere, Heath Ledger appears as Hank’s doomed son, Sonny, and Peter Boyle plays Hanks’s despicable father, Buck. Perhaps the biggest jump scare, however, comes in the shape of the actor playing Leticia’s husband. Is that… oh… yes… yes it is. Sean ‘Puff Daddy’ Combs. Awkward.
Monster’s Ball is not a film that is completely bereft of hope, but it is still a tough watch. These are desperate people. Desperately unhappy too. Director Marc Foster cannily explores the nature of cyclical abuse with Hank projecting his despair at his own father’s indifference on his similarly love-starved son. It’s a well-trodden path in pop culture but that’s partly because it’s such fertile ground for artistic endeavour. As Philip Larkin said, ”They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do”.
The other common trope that we have here is racist-fuckhead-learns-the-error-of-his-ways. When done badly, this archetype can be unearned and saccharine, but Thornton is so good here that he pulls it off, helped along of course by a bravura turn from Berry. The scene in which the two wayward protagonists finally connect for the first time is one of the most accurate portrayals of a drunken sexual encounter ever committed to film. It’s sad, passionate and yet deeply troubling all at the same time. Berry intoning that she ‘…just wants to feel good’ is heartbreaking in its sincerity and it is surely that specific moment that confirmed the recognition of the Academy.
Monster’s Ball is not a barrel of laughs by any means and I can’t see myself ever returning to it again but it is worth watching once for the quite spectacular performances from the two leads. Once seen, never forgotten.
