
Monster 2003 (DVD)

The true-life story of Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute executed in 2002 in Florida after being convicted of murdering six men. While Wuornos confessed to the six murders, including a policeman, she claimed to have killed only in self-defense, resisting violent assaults while working as a prostitute.In 1989-90, a love story unfolds in the midst of the horrors and pathologies of two misfits: Wuornos, a drifter prostitute and Selby Wall, sent by her parents to live with an aunt in Florida in order to "cure her homosexuality". Nearing suicidal despair, Aileen wanders into a bar, where she meets Selby and falls in love. To keep her and Selby's relationship alive, she continues hooking, only to fuel an increasingly escalating deadly rage, a fury vented with a lurid string of killings and the media's sordid designation of her as the first female serial killer--a monster. Monster does take some missteps, relying far too much at times on Theron’s voiceover to fill in gaps in the story, and not really showing us much of Wall’s character. And although Jenkins does seem to be hip to the fact that Wuornos was lying about her supposed motivations for all the killings, the film has a tendency to let her off the hook. Ultimately, though, this is a film with a story, concerned much less with shocking audiences than with showing how a brutalized childhood can result in a brutal adult.
Review ID: 10000000011314060

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