Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

MONSTER'S BALL is a film almost designed to enrage (or enlighten) two large groups of the American public. It invites them and us, in a Southern State [Georgia, but shot at Angola in Louisiana], to a party which traditionally precedes an electrocution, then shows us all the action, and persuades us to experience an ironic aftermath, at several levels.

Milo Addica and Will Rokos (who take small parts in the film) have written a screenplay which combines the vengeful and guilty preoccupations of these two unhappy American groups, so that at the point the two meet, we may well find the rest of us.

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The first group MONSTER'S BALL may anger, then, is made up of the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe in the Death Penalty. That majority hangs in for the generality, but in individual cases falls apart, which MONSTER'S BALL illustrates mordantly.

For one thing, no major study has ever shown that the death penalty is a deterrent to murder. In States where the Penalty applies, such as Michigan, Louisiana and Georgia, the murder rate has often been higher than in States where it does not. Certainly, we observe that the prison system provides a majory industry in the little Georgian town where MONSTER'S BALL takes place.

And no one can explain away why the wealthy and white of the Nation tend either to not be charged, or if charged not to be convicted, if convicted not executed for crimes which routinely lead to the execution of people of color. Better than 54% of all executions between 1930 and 1999 were carried out on such individuals, and these condemned murderers spent an average of over ten years waiting on Death Row. All of that is particularized in MONSTER'S BALL.

A central motivational plot point the film establishes is that even the most humane methods of execution fail on occasion, torturing their subjects to death.

[In October 2001, just prior to the release of MONSTER'S BALL, the Georgia Supreme Court, citing the "spectre of excruciating pain . . . and needless mutilation," banned the Electric Chair, leaving only Alabama and Nebraska using the device.]

We Americans take a certain self-righteous satisfaction in executions. Beyond simple monkey curiosity about revenge and death, which we share with the rest of the World, we have an obsessive, secretive, voyeuristic interest in how the death penalty is carried out. We are the only "civilized" nation in the Modern World to maintain the death penalty. And because we are all democrats in our various States, the executions are carried out in our names.

[That significant numbers of the convicted have recently also been found innocent through the application of DNA testing, or that hundreds of those executed since 1900 are estimated to have been innocent, is not a contention of MONSTER'S BALL.]

As viewers can experience for ourselves, early in MONSTER'S BALL, we recoil from and yet are drawn to the condemned person's last moments.

[Executions in the modern times have always been hidden to the general American public. Hence, in 1928, when a New York Daily News reporter took a picture with a concealed camera of murderess Ruth Schneider dying in the electric chair, it was a sensation. The photo insured the creation of novels and films drawn on the case, like DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Cain, 1936; Wilder, 1944). All attempts in America since then to film or televise executions have been turned back, but the audience is clearly there.]

What can be said for the Death Penalty is that, if the person did the crime, that person will murder no more. (Because of legal wrangles, however, we may have to wait up to 25 expensive years for the satisfaction.)

No doubt, advocates of the Death Penalty critical of MONSTER'S BALL might point out, the film never reveals quite what the murderer, Larry Mosgrove, did or how he did it.

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The other group possibly offended by MONSTER'S BALL are the racists of America. I don't speak here about some bigots found in the film, rather the majority of us who, say, "I'm not a racist, but -- " It is not in our overt acts that we reveal our racism, but in the averted eye, the slip of the tongue, the thoughtless remark, the remembered story of how we were once slighted, our quiet or harsh double take at seeing a couple of mixed race, the problematical rationalization that how we live our lives is better than how "they" do. (And of course, members of majorities or minorities alike, whatever we may be, we sometimes fail to recognize or admit that racism is an equal opportunity problem.)

Most of us are guilty about Race in our democracy, but the majority of us are no longer sadistic bigots about it. MONSTER'S BALL shows us three generations of changing attitudes toward the Death Penalty and Race in America, through the medium of The Grotowskies, a family of prison guards. In a Georgia prison town, Buck (Peter Boyle), ex-soldier, patriot, former corrections officer, an invalid who has lost his wife (suicide), is a hardcase, un-reconstructed White Supremacist. Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), his son, Chief of the Death House Detail, who has lost his wife (suicide), acts out of sense of strict duty to his work and his family. Young Sonny Grotowskie (Heath Ledger), Hank's son, an apprentice member of the Death House force, is a modern Southerner, who has seen what the shadow of the Death Penalty has done to his family; and who has grown up with people of color.

MONSTER'S BALL attempts to bridge the divide of racism, not to say outright bigotry, through the unlikely relationship of Chief Death House Officer Grotowskie (Thornton) with the spent wife, Leticia (Halle Berry), of executed murderer Larry Musgrove (Sean "Puffy" Combs).

From its opening titles, the photography of Roberto Schaefer (WAITING FOR GUFFMAN, 1997) and the editing of Matt Chesse emphasize the uniting division between the white guard and the black widow, color patterns playing upon them, as they move inexorably toward each other.

The film begins on the last day of Larry Musgrove's life in the Georgia prison. He is speaking to his obese, 12 year-old young son, Tyrell (Coronje Calhoun), in the visiting room of the Death House while his wife, Leticia, stands impatiently, irritably, to one side smoking a cigarette. She has been bringing the boy to the prison for 11 years. Mosgrove looks at a drawing the boy has made and gives him a sheaf of his own. The father tells his son that he was a bad man, but that Tyrell can have a successful life as an artist. The boy does not seem to believe him and clasps his father until pried away by the guards.

Leticia fails to give Larry even a farewell peck.

Meanwhile, Hank Grotowskie is gingering up his boy Sonny (Ledger), also a member of the Death Squad, under the jaundiced eye of patriarch Buck Grotowskie (Boyle). Larry Musgrove's execution will be Sonny's first. Hank is worried that Sonny will not stand up to the Family tradition of honor. A party of the guards, The Monster's Ball, is to be held that night at a local bar and grill, preparatory to the death watch. Hank wants to make sure that his son enters fully into the preparations for and the execution of Larry Musgrove.

So it goes, with scenes of rehearsal for the execution at the prison alternating with others of Buck insisting that Hank run off with a shotgun some black kids invited onto the property by Sonny. In between, we capture glimpses of Tyrell, secretly gobbling ice-cream and candy bars, waiting with Leticia for a final phone call from his father (which has been vetoed by the Warden).

After the death watch, we see Larry put into body irons in his cell, fitted with paper diapers, given a shave of his head and ankles, presented his last meal. Larry's contribution to The Monster's Ball comes when he makes drawings of Sonny and Hank. Then, we see Larry executed in excruciating detail.

The fact that Sonny breaks down at the psychological moment of the execution is the turning point in MONSTER'S BALL, insuring that the Musgroves' tragedy is shared by the Grotowskies, leading to a somewhat improbable relationship between the two families.

That MONSTER'S BALL works so well is a credit to Thornton (who apparently can do no wrong on Southern turf) and Berry, who brings her career to a new stage by emphasizing the unflattering attributes of a former model: skinny legs, spindly arms, etc. Only an actor of Thornton's caliber could make the spiritual turn of his character true. Only a great beauty, like Halle Berry, who wants to be seen as a serious actress would show her common, unburnished side, sitting splay-limbed on a couch with a throw, drinking Jack Daniels from Miniatures, beside what some would consider a homely middle-aged honky.

Hank and Leticia are united by similar losses, and that makes their relationship believable, though the reality of their experiences, social setting, and dependencies suggests it may not be happily ever after for them.

MONSTER'S BALL is a real Southern Gothic, fueled in certain sequences of the damp Georgia setting by a Hearts of Space sort of score (for which I can find no composer). And little unstated touches accentuate both the film's gothic qualities and its social history, such as the play of blue flame around Larry's ears in the Chair, or how the name Musgrove must be an older one in Georgia than Grotowskie. And how the execution and the later seduction scene between Leticia and Hank are both presented in a lurking horror film style, distant, shifting, as if the latter sequence might be seen as shameful as the former.

Even if the plot drives a creation of emotional discrepancies which are never fully resolved, it is beautifully shot, edited and acted. (Nice to see *Boyle, for instance, in a good serious part again.) And funny, I could not help thinking, that in MONSTER'S BALL, we reflect some progress toward social justice and artistic freedom in America. If, 50 years ago, counterparts of Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry had performed the strongly grounded erotic scenes which occur in MONSTER'S BALL, the film would have been banned in a dozen Southern States, and both Thornton and Berry would have been arrested if they ever stepped into any one of them. Bills would have been introduced in Congress to mandate greater control of the Movies. And 20 years before that, those bills would have passed.

MONSTER'S BALL is worth attending, for that reason, and other reasons more germane to the film itself.

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*It is interesting to remember that 30-some years ago, Peter Boyle made a brilliant impact as a kind of hardhat rendition of Hank Grotowskie in John G. Avildsen's JOE, a groundbreaking film about class divisions, sex and the young in America. (It was also Susan Sarandon's first film.)

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Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older