Aileen Wuornos is often tagged the first female serial killer and the first U.S. woman to receive the death penalty neither is true, as there have been reported executions of American women as far back as 1912 and she certainly wasn't the first woman to go on a killing spree. But she was perhaps the first to achieve a kind of rock-star status: Charged with the murders of seven men in Florida during the 1980s, she made headlines, gave TV interviews, had her face printed on T-shirts with slogans like "Death to All Sons of Bitches" and continued to generate media interest until her execution in 2002. Just before her demise, she had feminist groupies who saw her as an avenging angel what had started out as a personal tragedy had been blown up and then airbrushed for a political cause. How Aileen Wuornos really felt about this remains unknown; in the end, she had stopped talking to the press, expressing only her desire for a swift execution.
Director Patty Jenkins was among the many filmmakers fascinated by Aileen (Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield's documentary "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer" is the most prominent example), but her genius lay in the fact that she cast Charlize Theron to play her, reportedly after seeing a close-up of Theron's runny nose in "The Devil's Advocate." She had a hunch Theron would say yes to becoming Aileen a convicted killer and longtime hooker with bad teeth, sun-ravaged skin and an overweight swagger. There seems to be a lot of distance between all that and a runny nose, but Jenkins was right: Theron went the whole nine yards for "Monster." She put 13 kg of weight on her body and a mask of mottled latex skin on her face. She covered up her brilliant white teeth with buck fangs and mastered the slouching gait. For her trouble, she got the Academy Award for Best Actress, but she deserved it for much more than her makeup.
Confronted with the first scenes of Aileen swigging beer in a cheap Florida bar, my brain short-circuited while trying to reconcile this figure with Theron, the Charlize Theron whom I thought could never be anything less than spanking glamorous. Not only does Jenkins completely deglamorize her, she does a gray paint job on the whole movie as well there's simply nothing here that has been manicured. Nothing and no one is pretty, and "Monster" is coolly unapologetic about it.
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