In a few months time Marc Forster‘s Monsters’ Ball will observe its 20th anniversary. It was a difficult film then and is still difficult in some respects (I watched it a couple of days ago), but Halle Berry nonetheless made history by winning a Best Actress Oscar for her performance, and after 19 and 1/2 years she’s still the only woman of color who’s won such an honor.
Monster’s Ball digs deeply into family anger and rural racism and it dives whole hog into sex and sexuality as a means of redemption. It’s a story about a corrections officer who seeks escape and transcendence and finally achieves that (or a semblance of that) at the very end.
It’s a fantasy, agreed, but a compassionate one.
I’m not sure if Monster’s Ball (which I first saw in early November ’01 at the AFI Fest) would be produced in today’s climate. I’ll take that back — it wouldn’t be produced today, for the simple fact that Film Twitter would howl and cut it to pieces if it were to suddenly appear.
17 years ago an anonymous “Black Man, Husband, Father, Son, Actor, Producer, Director, Poet, Warrior,” et. al. wrote that he was angry about Berry’s character (Leticia Musgrove), “a single mother who falls for the great white racist white man WHO PUT HER HUSBAND AND FATHER OF HER CHILD (played by Sean Combs) TO DEATH.”
Okay, except Billy Bob Thornton’s death-row prison guard character (i.e., Berry’s love interest) isn’t a “great racist white man” — he’s a middle-aged cog in that great racist white-man machine/mentality who slowly divests himself of that ugliness and emotionally comes into his own, partly because he can’t stomach the pain of having driven his son to suicide, but largely and more simply because he’s fallen in love with Berry and wants/needs to redeem himself in God’s eyes through his feelings for her.