Jill Cozzi: Mmm-hmmm....

GS: Let's be upfront about the reason we came to see this today. We saw MONSTER because we heard that Charlize was great, and that the movie was good --

WHO:	Mixed Reviewers Jill Cozzi and Gabriel Shanks
WHAT:	A meeting-of-the-minds over a steaming hot cup of New York's finest
HOW:	Plain coffee, cream, and (for Gabriel) one Sweet and Low
WHERE:	City Crepe above Union Square

JC: -- or that Charlize was great and the movie was bad --

GS: Does it live up to the hype for you?

JC: Well, if you're expecting a performance of great import, I don't know. I think Charlize has always been a good actress, if not spectacular. Workmanlike.

GS: A model-turned-actress...

JC: Along the lines of Jessica Lange, who was also a model-turned-actress...and interestingly enough, who also had a breakthrough role of similar histrionics in Frances.

GS: I wouldn't quite put Theron in Lange's category. I watched MONSTER trying to figure out what people have loved about it. It has almost despicably lazy storytelling and seems really mundane. Why do people love this movie?  The only thing I can come up with is that no one expects Charlize Theron to be able to do much of anything. And so, they're wowed by the fact that she has made herself ugly, and put on weight, and has broad physicality and and an even broader accent. I mean, if there were an Oscar category for "Most Improved", maybe I'd support her. Maybe. But if this performance came from someone like Meryl Streep?  It would be embarrassing.

JC: Yes. But it's more than that. Charlize Theron is an extraordinarily attractive, competent actress -- nothing special, not bad. What bothers me about the hype around this particular performance is the "Bridget Jones Factor". You know, a terrific-looking actress gains thirty pounds and wears splotchy makeup...in other words, comes down off the mountaintop and deigns to look like the rest of us. The entirety of this role is its look. And the idea that this physical stuff somehow means you're an actress -- I mean, I can look terrible every day and no one will tell me I'm a great actress. Somehow, becoming what the rest of us are passes as method acting nowadays. The character work is secondary to the look.

GS: One of the criticisms that Halle Berry got in Monster's Ball -- which is the last time the "Bridget Jones Factor" worked to win an Oscar -- Halle got criticized for never being truly ordinary, and that it was nearly impossible to make Halle Berry ugly, or even normal. And I think that's true; I can't imagine Halle looking ugly. But in this film?

JC: Charlize looks bad.

GS: She really does. They've actually put makeup on her to distress her appearance as far as possible. Age lines, splotchy skin, split ends, bad hair -- they've made her up the way you'd make up an orc in Lord of the Rings.

JC: And yet, you're still aware of who she is. There's only so far that they'll take this ugliness stuff. The one scene in her underwear, you think, "Okay, she's got a little belly."  But other than that it's a model's body. All we know from MONSTER is where Charlize Theron puts on weight when she can't use her personal trainer for a month.

GS: Or when she chooses not to.

JC: Or when she chooses not to, yes. The rest of her skin is this lovely, tawny, Charlize Theron color. I don't get how these critics -- these straight male critics, I might add -- get that she's unrecognizable and that then she inhabits this character. She's not.

GS: Her physicality is so over-the-top butch. No, you're absolutely right -- it's not really acting. It's more...an impression of Aileen Wuornos, or an impersonation. She's not really portraying a person, so much as thinking 'this is what acting should be."

JC: Yes. Exactly.

GS: What about the film itself, though?  I think it is...well, pretty awful. The director/screenwriter, Patty Jenkins, has tried to humanize a despicable person...and she is completely ineffective at doing that. You don't feel sorry for Aileen. You don't feel much of anything about Aileen. You may feel sorry for her plight, but did you ever excuse or mitigate her behavior after learning things about her private life?  I didn't.

JC: I don't think I've ever felt quite as Republican in my life as I did watching this movie.

GS: But that's what you're left with. At the end of the day, rape is not an excuse for murder.

JC: I mean, I'm an anti-death penalty liberal, and at the end of the movie, I was happy to see her fry. You want to say, "hey honey, we've all got problems."  I realize that it's not that simple, that some people have serious problems and don't have the economic wherewithal to get good therapy. But this director almost tries to turn Aileen into a martyr the way that Kimberly Peirce did with Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry --

GS: Which is clearly the model Jenkins is following. Even the camera work recalls that film.

JC: The look of MONSTER is very, very much like Boys Don't Cry.

GS: But although you may have two sexually-struggling female victims of circumstance in Brandon Teena and Aileen Wuornos, in truth it's different. Brandon Teena is victimized by the larger world -- and that's where it stops. In MONSTER, Wuornos is victimized by the larger world...but she's also a victimizer. You can't really parse that; it's a really big moral mess. I think a really great screenwriter could have made something interesting of it -- turned Aileen into a Travis Bickle -- but Patty Jenkins is completely out of her depth. She has no idea how to tell this story. And so she settles for this lesbian movie-of-the-week, this freakishly uninteresting love story that makes up 80% of the film.

JC: It's interesting that you call it a lesbian movie-of-the-week, because the film doesn't even really have the courage to pursue that.

GS: No, you're right.

JC: But having seen it now, I think the lesbian flavor is what's driving the hype for this movie.

GS: Well, it's what drives the mania for the Aileen Wuornos story in general. She has been the subject of two separate documentaries, another film, two plays, and an opera...and she was just put to death last year.

JC: That's an awful lot of mileage to get out of a single vigilante.

GS: But we don't see this kind of artistic response to other serial murderers. Her lesbianism and her history as a prostitute give a sensationalistic color to the tale that artists can't seem to get enough of. This isn't just a serial killer...it's a Lesbian Prostitute Serial Killer! You can just hear Sharon Stone out there, waiting for a remake of Basic Instinct.

JC: This is the ultimate wages-of-sin movie. Even though it was made by a woman, MONSTER is an extremely reactionary film -- punitive to males. There's a vicarous thrill to watching all of this happen. I'd be very curious to know the audience demographics for this film.

GS: I can tell you that it's not being aggressively marketed to the gay community. Now that I think about it -- who is it being marketing to? I mean, look at us -- down here at the 19th Street East theatre, in the middle of nowhere, at a movie theatre that neither of us had been to before -- why is it down here, buried?  Because it's not very good.

JC: I want to get to Christina Ricci.

GS: Yes.

JC: Part of the problem Charlize Theron has in this movie is that Christina Ricci is next to her, who is absolutely effortless. She is great.

GS: And because she is so effortless --

JC: -- you can see how hard Charlize is having to work. That's the difference between a workmanlike performance and a brilliant one. A brilliant one makes it look easy. In Angels in America on HBO, Meryl Streep plays a rabbi, and a Mormon mother, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg...and it's easy for her. She doesn't even break a sweat. Charlize, on the other hand, is working very, very hard.

GS: And the seams start to show. On some level, it makes the whole film unpleasant to watch. You just get kind of fatigued watching Charlize work so hard. It's just not very good acting -- there's a lot of Jim Carrey-ish mugging. There were points where the audience laughed at this movie, inappropriately.

JC: There's a real problem, sadly, in knowing who is playing the performance. If they had plucked some girl out of nowhere and put her in this role, this would be a brilliant breakthrough opportunity.

GS:  As they did with Hilary Swank.

JC:  Who hasn't done a good piece of work since. It's like, Brandon Teena was her big role, and she did it beautifully...but she's really not very good at anything else. But in MONSTER, Charlize is a star -- you know who you're watching. You never losing track of who you're seeing, even through the makeup.

GS: Anything else?  I want to say that this is our third year of doing Critics Over Coffee, and we've always done pictures about women -- two years ago we did Charlotte Gray, and last year we did The Hours, and now this.

JC: We should have done Something's Gotta Give.  I'd be very interested to see what we'd do with that one!

GS: My point is, the films have degenerated over the last few years. So I want to tell our readers to go back and read our Charlotte Gray review, because that's a really good movie!

JC: Yes, it is. Okay, in closing: a very unpleasant movie, with a semi-interesting stretch by an actress who's trying to be taken seriously. But this shouldn't knock anything else off your holiday moviegoing list.

GS: Agreed. Good.