Mark Forster
Monster's Ball

The disappearance of an individual sets off a series of reactions in the minds of everyone around them, prompting change. It's true, this theme has already been explored in "Saturn in Opposition," "The Barbarian Invasions," "The Sea Inside" (in its own way), and Cameron Crowe has built an entire filmography on the idea of rebirth after death. So why should "Monster's Ball" make a difference?

Mark Forster started, like many others, from the bottom. From his native Germany, he landed in Hollywood and began working in "Low-Budget" cinema, gaining attention at the Sundance Film Festival with the unknown "Everything Put Together" and slowly started climbing the ranks. He was still at the early stages when he shot "Monster's Ball" in 2001, a film that would definitively launch him (followed by "Neverland," if it interests anyone). A shower of Golden Globes, waves of Oscars including one snatched by Halle Berry as the best (first) lead actress (of color), storms of praise, torrents of commendations. And all this chatter piques curiosity, as we know.

Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) is an executioner. He is responsible for executing inmates sentenced to capital punishment. His father (Peter Boyle), who practiced the same profession, is now infirm, while his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), whom he encouraged to follow in his footsteps (professionally speaking), seems unable to accept the harshness and rigidity with which his father completes his duties and shows impatience towards the grandfather's racism. Their lives are marked by a continuous repetition of the same actions. The encounter with the usual prostitute, the usual cup of ice cream enjoyed in the dead of night, the usual execution of inmates. During a sad argument with his father, Sonny commits suicide, and Hank decides to quit his job.

The stories of the Grotowski family overlap with those of Leticia (Halle Berry), widow of a death row inmate (Sean Combs alias P. Diddy) brought to the electric chair by the Grotowskis and mother of the obese Tyrell. One night, Tyrell gets hit by a car, and by chance, it's Hank who comes to the aid of mother and son. The rush to the hospital is futile for Tyrell, but Hank and Leticia slowly begin to form a relationship of friendship, and then love. Despite the woman eventually discovering that Hank is her husband's executioner, she decides to stay with him, never finding the courage to say anything about it.

The lives of Hank and Leticia are different at the film's beginning but converge through a single perspective in the end. The male protagonist lives his life as an obligation. It's as if witnessing the day of an inmate who, with very little free time, dedicates himself to the same activities with equal zeal. As mentioned before, with the same meticulousness, Hank diligently performs his work, has encounters with a prostitute, witnesses the murder of his son, buries him, cleans the bloodstained chair, helps Berry and her son, (re)cleans the car seat stained with Tyrell's hemorrhage, and begins a relationship with Leticia. She bears all the weight of her misery breaking her back due to her criminal husband and her son whom she desperately wants to lose weight ("Because in America, a black person cannot also be fat"), and financial troubles.

When they meet, each becomes an outlet for the other's baggage of frustrations and long-repressed feelings. Forster illustrates a gradual detoxification process culminating in an orgasmic peak, a long and heated sex scene that inevitably compares with that between Hank (or rather Sonny) and the prostitute. The relationship turns into an engagement but encounters an obstacle: Hank's father, as mentioned, is racist and could not tolerate a black daughter-in-law. He is quickly placed in a nursing home. The desire to distance himself from his father and buy a gas station named after his beloved (what an exaggeration... realistically speaking, most might at best get a canary named after them, a bouquet of flowers, and a button) are clear signs of a primordial fear: loneliness. Hank does everything not to displease Leticia and give her reasons to leave him, and likewise, she cannot bring herself to tell him that she knows he is her husband's executioner, and remains in a daze outside on the porch eating ice cream with Hank, keeping that little truth to herself as they watch the vast night sky.

There are quite a few scenes that leave one astonished. The anger with which Hank addresses his subordinates, the swift and effective moment of Sonny's suicide ("You hate me, don't you, Dad?" "Yes" "But I always loved you" and Bam!), the mechanical sex with the prostitute, and the fierce one with Leticia, the maternal reaction in front of her son's death... It's impossible to remain indifferent to the proverbial performances of the actors, Thornton above all.

Even though Forster tries to maintain a line of communication that tends to be quick with shots and sequences aimed at a specific purpose, he repeatedly stumbles into the danger of filling the script with themes and reflections of various shapes and content (capital punishment, the degradation of American suburban neighborhoods, the triad of sex-death-life). But this doesn't diminish the film's charm by even a shred.