Halle Berry, Billy Bob Make "Monsters Ball" a Film Treat

"MONSTER'S BALL" CAST:

Sonny Grotowski-- Heath Ledger Buck G. --Peter Boyle; Hank G. --Billy Bob Thornton Leticia Musgrove --Halle Berry Larry. --Sean Combs Tyrell M. -- Coronje Calhoun DIRECTOR: Marc Forster STUDIO: Lion's Gate

"Monsters Ball" is one of those pictures that some people may have to be dragged to kicking and screaming. Afterwards they'd have to admit that they enjoyed the strange ride. If someone were to describe the movie starring the Academy Award nominated role of Halle Berry as the wife of a death row inmate opposite Billy Bob Thornton as his executioner, you'd be excused in thinking at first that it was something you'd wait on. But then you'd be missing out on seeing what true cinematic storytelling is all about.

The film is a contemporary Southern slice of lives of several people. "Monsters Ball" manages to interweave the uneasy mix of Africans in America and their fit into Southern societies' roles. The interracial romance aspect is another part of the mix that has received way more than its rightful share of publicity.

At a private screening a small group was observed as they watched the film, provided as an Academy Ward screener tape for voting and critical purposes. The mostly female group's reactions went from incredulity to shock, then something akin to grudging acceptance of the changes the characters went through.

"Monster's Ball" is more akin to the real fabric of the South and its hundred's years of chattel bondage, how it seemingly elevates while it denigrates their women, and how people from very different backgrounds can still find common ground. Although slow moving, the tale moves inexorably along with engrossing images and characterizations. It has the pacing and deliberateness of a foreign film, and in fact should do well overseas as the common themes of tragedy loss, redemption and different ethnicities is something that can play from Ukraine to India.

The film score seems almost nonexistent in the first third, aside from car radio playing, juke boxes and the like. This sets "Monster's Ball" apart from most films right there. Billy Bob Thornton plays Hank Grotowski, who has absorbed a legacy of racism passed down from his parents. There is strife and drama between he and his son, who as played by Heath Ledger from "Knight's Tale" and "10 Things I Hate about You" and Mel Gibson's "Patriot" who is trying to break the chains of racism and sexism that is tearing his family apart.

The connection between Hank and Halle Berry's Leticia Musgrove is through their children, as was observed by one of the few males at the showing last Sunday at Savoy's. Leticia's son is on his way to being morbidly obese, hiding candy bars around his room and preparing to mourn for his soon to be executed father, played by a more than capable Sean "P. Diddy" Combs.

"Look at you. Look at this room. Its a mess! You know why? because a fat little piggy lives here!!" she screams at the boy, pulling on his blubber and slapping him around. Later she confides in Hank who she meets at her restaurant job, "I don't want him to grow up fat, because you can't be a Black man in America and be fat..."

A father son scene at the prison is apparently the only place they've ever seen each other that the boy can remember. "But why can't I see you again? the son tearfully asks.

"I have to go away," Larry says, "because I'm a bad man..." "But who says so?"

"I say so," Larry says, with an acceptance of who he is and his fate. To make us more identify with him (and also be in opposition to the death penalty), as in Stephen King's "The Green Mile" we are never told of Larry's transgressions. We are also never shown pictures of Hank's wife and his mother, both of whom interestingly took their own lives in the quiet desperation of the Southern women under a slow-motion Taliban-like oppression covered up with fake genteel-ness and lace, instead of heavy burqas.

Halle Berry's back in working class Skank mode again, as her early days as the Crack Hoe in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" and "Losing Isaiah." The former Miss Ohio and Broadway dancer worked hard to be taken seriously as more than just a pretty face, which is hard considering her natural beauty.

The sometimes Milwaukeean and Mrs. Eric Benet played opposite John Travolta in "Swordfish," and played a femme fatale in "The Flinstones" and "The Rich Man's Wife." This is the film that marks Berry's dramatic makeover, and she deserves the Oscar nomination. Her rough ways, the way she sits with her legs open on the sagging couch watching TV, drinking Jack Daniels from miniature bottles held up and to the side, so they won't block her view.

The rough interracial sex has been the draw for many, and "Monster's Ball" has it in more than one scene. These includes the shared whore between father and son, doggystyle "quickies" if there ever were. The scenes with Berry and Thornton, where in a drunk and grief-induced stupor she goes on the offense and tells him to "make me feel good!" as she peels off her top, are framed through doorways and past furniture with a handheld camera to make us seem like Peeping Toms. There is little romance shown in the scenes; that comes later through little scenes like the two sitting on a porch eating symbolic chocolate ice cream.

One of the standouts is Peter Boyle as Hank's unregenerate racist father Buck, the first of the line of three generations of Georgia corrections officers. Boyle has sparked critical acclaim here and there over his long career, and his role as the aging patriarch of a working class family with a dysfunctional heritage of choking racism and sexism is again garnering him the type of acclaim he received from his roles in "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" and in his starring comedic role as The Monster with Gene Wilder in "Young Frankenstein."

"Look at them. There was a time when niggas knew their place," says Buck as they sit at the table and watch Hanks gentle son with some neighbor boys he's befriended as they walk the spacious yard in the summertime.

"Your mother, she hated them niggas too," he prods his son, who up to now has taken no real offense. Hank takes the cue and confronts his son and the duo with a shotgun, squeezing a few shots into the air, scaring the boys off.

Later their father confronts Hank.

"No need to be scaring my boys like that with no shotgun. They don't mean no harm." "They were on my property. "They friends of your son. He invited them. They weren't trespassin'." "Nevertheless, keep them off it." "They ain't nothin' but little boys. Next time you wanna play cowboy, you come over here and see me. I'm right here alla time." "Well, you keep them off my property." "I think you heard me sir." "And you heard me, too."

Thornton to his credit hasn't gone Hollywood on us, and has taken on roles that show the complexity of the Southern way of life. Some of those roles are painful, as this one as Hank the healing racist. Another one was in the Arkansas based "The Apostle" with Robert Duvall, who has become somewhat of a devotee to things Southern since his Academy Award for "Tender Mercies."

In the film Thornton was a racist who was going to use his bulldozer to destroy a church where Black and White parishioners were gathering for the Old Testament fire and brimstone preaching of Duvall. He broke down in tears after they surrounded the 'dozer with Bibles which he refuse to run over, then broke down in tears as they surrounded him and hugged him, praying over him as his shoulders wracked with sobs.

In "Primary Colours" with John Travolta Thornton played a character based on political strategist James Carville who proudly proclaimed he yes, he was a Redneck. But he then castigated the young Black operative for Travolta's Clintonesque character by saying "I'm more Black than you are! I have slave in me. I can feel it!!"

Thornton first gained wider notice in his role as a trio of robber-killers in the likewise southern based "One False Move," with Cynda Williams as his Black girlfriends as they fled Los Angeles for Star City, Arkansas.

"MONSTERS BALL" directed by Marc Forster is from Lion's Pictures and is rated R for some pretty rough in your face sex. The film is not for children at all. There are also some graphic execution scenes that might upset the squeamish. There were some flinching observed by the crowd at Savoy's at the screening when P. Diddy got his jolt in the electric chair.

Email or call kevinjwalker@blackwebportal.com, (414) 454-9673, or write P.O. Box 1324-53201, and be sure and visit the film review websites at: http://cinemaviews.tripod.com ; http://www.blackwebportal.com/wire Balantidiasis allantoid complaining skewing actinogram corporatism sialoscanography acephalopodius stomatology constraining helminthoma.
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