Monster's Ball

It's hard to know what to make of this film other than it speaks to a peculiarly American appetite for portenteously romanticised tosh masquerading as dramatic realism.

Way down South in Jackson, Tennessee, Billy Bob Thornton is a hard-nosed emotionally-constipated prison guard, living with his nasty emphysemic rascist former prison guard father (Peter Boyle) and his sensitive prison guard son (Heath Ledger). Whilst Pop sits at home cursing Fate, father and son execute a Negro (Sean "Puffy" Combs), the son kills himself, the father takes up with the bootylicious executed man's wife (Halle Berry) after her weight-problemed son is killed in a car accident and they find love, or something like it.

Given that one is willing to suspend credulity at the number of coincidences required to get the plot to work, one still is required to accept that the two principals develop a relationship amidst what would appear to be for most quite shatteringly tragic circumstances, certainly ones which would displace the need for chocolate (did it have to be chocolate?) ice-cream. Given that this film was generally critically well-received in the US apparently no significant incongruity between idea and substance was noticed there. But then think of the rapturous praise Stateside for The Shawshank Redemption and perhaps this lessens the incomprehensibility.

That Halle Berry won an Oscar for Best Actress (beating out Judi Dench's turn in Iris) for her unlikely representation of a poor black trash single mother is only slightly less disconcerting although she certainly convinces in the pivotal love-making scene. Determinedly slow-paced Billy Bob Thornton, however, anchors the movie which despite moments that effectively look into the well of loneliness is far too reassuringly neat and prettily packaged in its delivery to convince any but the gullible that life is even slightly like that.

 

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