By Armond White

Two Girls, Phat and Thin
Meg Ryan redeemed while Theron cons Hollywood.

Against the Ropes
Directed by Charles S. Dutton

Monster
Directed by Patty Jenkins

In a healthy film culture, Meg Ryan’s performance in Against the Ropes would win the kind of acclaim Charlize Theron has rooked. As Jackie Kallen, the real-life Cleveland boxing manager, Ryan pulls together the tensions and coquettishness that have long stymied her artistry.

The once-good actress of Joe Versus the Volcano, Promised Land and Innerspace has been lost to Norah Ephron’s sham romanticism. Against the Ropes comes at the right time. Paramount shelved it for a year, making room for Ryan’s Jane Campion excursion, In the Cut–a noxious film and a transparent performance. Here, Ryan’s age and apparent sexual experience add up to a credible portrait that is part of the film’s larger look at how an underestimated Irish woman, an aged black fight trainer (Charles S. Dutton) and a cynical young street fighter (Omar Epps) challenge each other, then learn to compete with the world.

This is preferable to Campion’s porno-feminism, but don’t expect hipster critics to praise it. (They also slept on Paramount’s neglect of the hilarious Marci X.) Against the Ropes is only superficially Rocky-like entertainment; it has a wider, deeper social view. And Ryan shoulders the trashy-dressing Kallen’s dilemma with a low, worldly voice and less preening than Julia Roberts’ Erin Brockovich. Ryan’s been too cute for too long but with director Charles S. Dutton’s rapport, she finally stops trying to con the audience. When Kallen pushes her way into the boy’s club of fight promotion, Ryan shows how the sweetness can be turned on and off. As a result, she’s never been so sexy or piquant.

Our sick film culture overlooks Ryan’s subtlety (and Diane Keaton’s in Something’s Gotta Give) in favor of freakshows like Monster. But Charlize Theron received her most perceptive review for Monster when critic Gregory Solman said, "It’s not a performance. It’s a publicity stunt." Sad thing is, Theron’s awards season strategies–right out of the Harvey Weinstein playbook–have turned the trick. Media shills everywhere have promoted her beautiful-starlet-gets-ugly shtick. What no one has dared say is that Theron’s calculations, plus writer-director Patty Jenkins’ insensitivity, have produced a movie of unrivaled repugnance.

Playing Aileen Wuornos, the real-life Florida prostitute who murdered seven men, Theron aimed for the shallowest of liberal, pseudo-feminist sentiments. In last week’s publicity stunt at the Berlin Film Festival, she made a press statement against capital punishment (although Theron hasn’t yet expressed remorse for any of Wuornos’ victims). Jenkins’ movie depicts Wuornos as victim–a pathetic product of Florida’s white-trash culture and Christian fundamentalism, a target of men’s brutish desires. The movie’s many death scenes don’t include Wuornos’ lethal injection, only the deaths of the luckless men who picked her up on the Sunshine State’s highways–presumably each one a summary execution.

Dumb critics have described Wuornos as "America’s first female serial killer" as if she had won an Olympics championship. A friend averred, "The first one they caught." But not the first female killer to be enshrined at the movies. The title Monster is as duplicitous as a femme fatale; we’re meant to be both titillated and aghast. That’s part of Jenkins-Theron’s entertainment ritual, linking Wuornos’ rampage to the slasher movie syndrome. (Imagine being asked to share Hannibal Lecter’s warped sense of righteousness.) Instead of probing a murderess’ psychosis, these filmmakers pretend gritty realism–the stylistic refuge of scoundrels. Their Wuornos is less actual monster than ideological pet. She exacts the revenge of the not-pretty woman.

Theron’s gimmick (a 30-pound keister, de-colored hair, false teeth and ugmo make-up) is ghoulish–like the slimy green beasts in children’s comic books. This exaggeration allows middle-class reviewers to patronize the characterization as a representation of the wretched underclass. In fact, Theron’s misguided sympathy with Wuornos’ rages (her short-term plans to make money, her co-dependent hook-up with half-wit Selby, her poorly thought out notions of going straight, her abrasive demands for help) coincides with specious actorliness. It’s the kind of empathy that crawls out from under a rock.

Like Denzel Washington in Training Day, Theron is willing to commit any disgrace in order to get an effect (i.e. Oscar). As facile a performer as Washington, Theron has shown a similar talent–the art of being attractive. Her previous, never-deep characterizations (The Yards, The Devil’s Advocate, Sweet November, Men of Honor, The Italian Job) were charm school exercises. Because she was pretty, one noticed the slightest register of feeling. Movie star acting often veers close to flirtation, which made Theron delectable in That Thing You Do and Mighty Joe Young. In Monster she twists flirting into browbeating–the desperate recourse of an actress who is lethally unimaginative. Critical cliche says Theron "dug deep within herself," but hold on–her hostility and frustration are very close to the surface. It’s grandstanding like Washington’s cliched "black anger."

Theron’s performance fails because Patty Jenkins refused to make a humane examination of Wuornos’ crimes. This director’s hatred of men is also very close to the surface. Through Jenkins’ narrow-minded social perspective, Wuornos and her lesbian girlfriend Selby (played by Christina "I want to go to Fun Land" Ricci) were trapped in a lowdown world of religious zealots, indifferent working folk, dishonest cops and predatory father figures. Even if this view were accurate rather than prejudiced, it doesn’t account for why no one else (only Wuornos) was driven mad by this unfair culture. Jenkins uses Wuornos’ alluring grievances to justify her own attack on the working class, her own facile loathing of male authority. (Inexplicably, Selby’s placating mom shows a surprising worldliness for a supposedly devout churchgoer.) Theron hits a similarly arrogant note in her Oscar campaigning: "I’m from a farm in South Africa," she minced in her Golden Globes speech, not letting on that farm girl equals land-owner/exploiter, or that she left S.A. once apartheid ended.

It was in South Africa that Theron witnessed her mother killing her "abusive" step-father, a memory that, years later, made her shed crocodile tears on ABC’s Primetime Live–proof that Theron has no moral awareness. She leapt at playing Wuornos out of the shabbiest motives. This must be clarified in order to distinguish the obviousness of Theron’s acting from the media’s sentimentality about the characterization. To accept Wuornos’ monstrousness (a casualty of an unjust social system) is simply the flip-side idiocy of awarding an actress for a cynical career move. Theron’s temerity should be appalling, and Wuornos’ crime should be dramatized with a sense of disgust. Jenkins’ limited directing style only goes from glum to dismal. She reaches exploitation-movie heights (depths) in the first murder that includes bondage, buggery (with a lead pipe), brutalization, shrieking and a gun-blasting climax. We’re also meant to confuse the police who capture Wuornos with marauding bikers out for a gangbang. That’s the typical lasciviousness Roger Ebert gets off on; so he led the pack praising "One of the best performances in the history of the cinema." Ebert’s hyperbole was gauged to legitimize the film’s outrageousness, to make its routine sensationalism acceptable. This is how the culture declines.

Out of misguided feminism and B-movie taste, Monster gets mistaken for serious filmmaking. Its canonization of a serial killer is as irresponsible as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant turning the Columbine tragedy into a high-art slasher movie. (In First of the Month, John Demetry writes, "Van Sant replaces people’s confusion and sublimates contemporary pain...with the safety and comfort of the Age’s sophistication.") We’ve come so far from the psychological and sociological investigation of killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song that we have retraced the movements of pop’s social consciousness and now are behind Capote and Mailer’s discoveries–which were important because they were also discoveries of our own criminal potential, our community dread, our uncertain fates.

Monster doesn’t rate those landmarks; it recalls the trash mockumentary Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (another Ebert fave), this time with the gloss of fashionable female anguish. Theron’s cosmetic transformation is a form of Poverty Chic; by making herself visually repellent she wins The New Yorker’s bourgeois approval. David Denby took the bait, saying that if "the Academy can pull themselves together and face Monster, they should know whom to vote for as the best actress of the year." But is award-grubbing the point of filmmaking (or criticism)? Monster’s kudos expose the media’s biases about which public figures deserve sympathy or sanctioning. (Imagine the outrage if Denzel Washington played Colin Ferguson). At the very least it distorts notions of good acting.

There have been extraordinary film characterizations of women under extreme stress: starting with Lillian Gish in anything, Rene Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc on to Jane Fonda in Klute, Jessica Lange in Frances, Alfre Woodard in Miss Evers’ Boys, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Angelina Jolie in Gia. Don’t forget Ingmar Bergman’s legendary actresses, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann. These women achieved an expressive simplicity that was soul-baring–not offensive to our sense of justice and without the banality of fake ugliness. Theron’s characterization is not one people will remember or identify with. Its ugliness is truly wretched.