Marc Forster
Monster's Ball - L'ombra della vita

THE REVIEW

Monster's Ball - The Shadow of Life.

Billy Bob Thornton confirms himself among the best actors of his generation. Halle Berry also does well, winning an Oscar for this performance. She did well given the extremely difficult role assigned to her, but honestly, she could and should have done much more in my opinion.

The talented and late Heath Ledger also appears in a brief but significant role. Director Marc Forster is commendable too, in his first 'important' feature film after two independent films. However, it's worth noting that this film was also low-budget and shot in just 5 weeks.

The story, in the best American cinematographic tradition of the last 20 years, is a paradoxical intertwining and entanglement of death and pain. It's a melodrama that makes you cringe, the kind where A shoots B who was the wife of C but A and C had been at war in Vietnam and didn’t know they were half-brothers because they had the same father D, who once had slept with B, so C's son E was actually not his son but the half-brother not only of C but also of A. A who actually meant to shoot E and not B because E had stolen a batch of cocaine from him, which turned out not to be cocaine but talcum powder because the real theft had already been done by C just minutes earlier. A would never have shot B, you see, he loved B, he had been her lover forever, but B had shielded her body to save her son E.

Now, please, let’s not circulate this plot or they'll make a film out of it right away :)

However, as I was saying, even though the melodrama with all its twists is lethal, I cannot deny that the film is very beautiful. Beautiful in its cinematography, soundtrack, concise. It progresses with no hesitations, carrying a strong load of pain and tension that is well-maintained throughout its 111 minutes.

Uncomfortable topics are treated, such as racism, the death penalty, and the grief of losing a child, without concessions, hesitations, or rhetoric. 

Recommended.