There are a number of movies my ex-wife would talk up, many of which she would watch if she found them on TV no matter how far along they were. As a result, I tended to see, well, the endings of many of them and rarely the whole film. Monster’s Ball wasn’t quite the same, but she did talk it up, and as with a lot of movies she talked up, I wasn’t all that interested in seeing it because, well, I saw too many of them from about halfway through. Well, Monster’s Ball got Halle Berry an Oscar. That might be worth checking out.
Then again, I realized during my research portion where I look up actor names and the like, that both of the actors playing the son of one of the leads has since died rather young. That’s kinda sad in a coincidental way.
Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thorton) is a widower who works as a prison guard alongside his son Sonny (Heath Ledger). Hank’s racist father Buck (Peter Boyle) also lives there and lords it over his son. It would seem that Hank’s own view on black people are just as enlightened as Buck’s. Meanwhile, talented artist Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Combs) is on death row, getting only the occasional visit from his wife Leticia (Halley Berry) and son Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun). However, not long after Lawrence’s execution, Hank and Sonny get into a fight that ends with Sonny’s suicide, all while Leticia is about to be evicted from her home and unable to pay her bills even as she works as a waitress and does the best she can as a single mother to a son she harshly chides as overweight.
Tragedy, however, soon finds a way to bring both Hank and Leticia together. Hank, though, had a hand in Lawrence’s execution. The two probably encountered each other at the prison but never quite put that together, and it may be that Hank’s role in Lawrence’s death will cause problems as the two start a tentative romance. Will that end their bond before it really starts? And will Buck ruin it for Hank? Or will Hank remember he’s also pretty racist?
Yeah, that last question may sound a bit silly, but it did occur to me that at a certain point, Hank just stopped being a racist. I guess it could be he was only behaving that way because of the toxic influence Buck had on his life, but it did show something of a sea change in how Hank was before and after Sonny’s suicide. I suppose it could also be a case of how a racist learns not to be just be befriending a Person of Color, but if that’s the case, I tend to think that the movies have maybe gotten a little more sophisticated in how they portray racism. And even if they haven’t, then the way many people think about racism and what it is has changed a bit regardless. This movie seems to skip over that in a way I didn’t much care for.
That said, Thorton and especially Berry are great in this one. As a small drama about the nature of grief leading to love, there’s a lot to like about Monster’s Ball, but if it’s trying to say something about racism or even the end result of both Hank and Leticia separately learning the thing that connects the two of them, well, there should have been a bit more to that. The movie sets up the reveal for a while then just seems to toss the pair together in the last forty-five minutes or so. That felt like a pacing problem to me, so despite the performances of the two leads, I think this could have been a lot better.
Grade: B-
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