Monster’s Ball
A Lions Gate Films release. Directed by Marc Forster. Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Heath Ledger, Peter Boyle and Sean Combs
by Daniel D. Williams
In discussing this indie flick, critics have made a big whoop-tee-do about Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton’s “buck-nekkid” interracial love scene. Nothing wrong with hyping a movie, but the buzz distracts from a film whose real attraction is its powerful messages about life, death and humanity. “Monster’s Ball” refers to the morbid party that executioners throw the night before they throw the switch on fated death-row inmates. Billy Bob is Hank Grotowski, a pedigreed death-row corrections officer at Georgia State Penitentiary,his emphysema-afflicted daddy Buck (Peter Boyle) preceded him as an executioner and Hank’s softhearted boy Sonny (Heath Ledger) is being groomed for the family business. The film takes a gritty, unsparing look at death, but delivers an anti-death penalty message without the heavy-handedness of “Dead Man Walking” or “The Green Mile.” This film focuses on how an execution affects both executioner and the executed person’s family. It is racial tension, however, that splinters the executioner-family and gives the film its purpose. Buck is a bigot and Sonny is colorblind while Hank tries to mimic Switzerland. But in a twist of fate, Hank and the widow (Halle Berry) meet and soon become a tangle of arms, legs and tattoos, and emotionally drawn to each other, as well. The message is that all people hunger for family, love and understanding.
, Daniel D. Williams
