I have been lucky to have my essay on the immersive MONSTER'S BALL published by SCREEN QUEENS.
I thank features editor MEGAN WILSON for choosing to publish an essay close to my heart.
Read it and share your thoughts.
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‘Monster’s Ball’: On Two Lives in Unison
" Ever since I watched Monster’s Ball in 2018 (and then re-watched it in 2019), its naturalistic expression of two lives caught in the crosshairs of personal and eventually interpersonal grief never left me. It shouldn’t, given its classic status as a dramatic work of art that won accolades galore, particularly highlighting the crescent of Halle Berry’s storied career. Its major source of generating empathy and compassion is its original screenplay which is so restrained in the exploration of pain and suffering: it’s almost novelistic. That, on top of the performances and direction by Marc Forster makes it beautifully integrate two seemingly disparate but emotionally tangible lives. These are two people who are distanced by the commonplace way of life itself, in a sea of millions per se where their paths never cross and there’s nothing to indicate that it should be otherwise. However, as they occupy a small town and maybe fate had in store for them an unlikely union, they meet, extricated from the common thread that binds them till the very end. We as viewers are given the pieces of the puzzle, to make us privy to the harsh realities of their working class consciousness.
Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton) and Leticia Musgrove (Halle Berry) give a whole new meaning to the idea that ‘opposites attract’, or even a ‘meet cute’, because nothing is linear in Monster’s Ball. Neither are they in the flush of youth. Most importantly, they are on opposite sides of the social/racial spectrum. Hank is a prison guard overlooking the last moments of an African-American death row inmate Laurence Musgrove (Sean Combs) and his physical stance shows us a man burdened by his fated position in the prison complex that once fended his father’s work life. Nothing suggests he is happy. Why should he be, given his line of work? He is just another facilitator of the law. Even then he ensures the last moments of his current ward are dignified and restrained before death eventually calls him out to the electric chair. His son Sonny (Heath Ledger) too is united with him in the line of duty. Grotowski Sr. only lives by the book. Grotowski Jr. extends an extra hand of succour in a set-up where listless and dispassionate delivery of executions have always been the norm. There is friction between both owing to the way they view truths of life. A generational gap divides yet intertwines them, signifying their unity in terms of both professional and familial relationships.
Leticia too has her chips on her shoulder; they are more glaringly obvious. Her racial status, compounded by her husband Laurence’s inevitable fate, has made her hardened and years of suffering and a dead end life as a waitress looking after their only child clearly reflects in her last meeting with the man she may have once loved and cherished. We are never given the nature of his crime or if this is another instance of a minor felony getting the hard end of the law owing to racial considerations alone. All we know is that not even a trace of pain or gullibility shows in her body language or biting words, at least at face value.
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