Great Performance, Rotten Movie. Review on Monster's Ball Movie

Monster's Ball is a rotten film that happens to have some nice performances, most notably that of Halle Berry, who won the Oscar for Best Actress. She plays Leticia, an impoverished and newly widowed waitress who is caring for her obese and retarded son. When her son is killed in a hit-and-run, she is befriended by an apparent Good Samaritan, Hank, who is played by Billy Bob Thornton. They eventually become lovers.

The problem is that the first part of the movie goes to considerable lengths to show that Hank is not a nice guy at all; in fact he's a brutal, racist corrections officer. When we first see him, he is having very mechanical sex with a prostitute. Later, he chases a pair of black kids off his property with a shot gun, and beats up his own son. Not a nice man. His one redeeming trait seems to be his willingness to care for his father, who is also repellently bigoted.

The main theme of the movie is Hank's redemption. He learns to help and care for others. He learns to accept black people as his equals. On paper, this might sound okay, but the movie goes completely over the top. It gets so ridiculous, that people, including yours truly, were laughing at parts that were probably not intended to be funny, including some of the sex scenes.

I could accept Hank stopping to help a hit-and-run victim and getting them to a hospital. I could see him giving somebody a ride to work from time to time. I could certainly see him putting his disgusting father in a nursing home. I could also believe that his son's suicide would make him question his beliefs. But I couldn't believe he'd have an intimate and loving relationship with a black woman. Hank is old enough to have had an adult son, which would make him about 45 or 50 years old--and he was raised by a bigoted father. Nobody can shed four or five decades' worth of ideology as quickly and easily as he does in the movie.

Another very unfortunate flaw of the movie is that it showcases Hank's redemption at Leticia's expense. Basically, Leticia is an extremely weak and helpless character, who loses everything she has during the movie and becomes utterly dependent on Hank. He gives her a car when hers dies, and he even takes her in when she's evicted. This last is especially preposterous. The movie is set in rural Georgia, and interracial couples are still not accepted, at least not as easily as the movie would have you believe.

In sum, this a wretched movie that has nothing beyond an Oscar-winning performance going for it. If you're not a Halle Berry fan, give it a miss.