Mankillers: 'monster' & 'boxed'.

Few criminals have won more notoriety in recent years than Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute executed in Florida in 2002 for the murders of seven men who solicited her. Wuornos has been the subject of articles and books, and also two documentaries in which she mythologized herself into a Bonnie Parker-like renegade while offering conflicting explanations for the murders: self-defense, robbery, revenge against men. Now Charlize Theron has added to the Wuornos legend with her Oscar-winning portrayal of the serial killer in Monster.

Monster's writer-director Patty Jenkins presents Wuornos as a victim of childhood sexual abuse grown into an adult so angry she walks around muttering to herself, sunk in a rage that seems borderline psychotic. In the opening shot we see her sitting by a highway in a driving rainstorm, soaked and dazed, holding a gun in her hand. She's down to her last five dollars, we learn later, and she's going to spend it in a bar and then kill herself. A chance encounter changes the plan. The bar turns out to be a gay bar, where a shy teenager named Selby (Christina Ricci) offers her a beer. Selby has been sent to stay with a strict aunt and uncle as punishment for making a pass at a girl back home in Ohio, and when her desperate need to follow verboten sexual urges meets Aileen's equally desperate need for love, a relationship is born.

It is startling to watch Charlize Theron, one of Hollywood's most bankable beauties, transform herself into the ravaged and overweight Wuornos. The effect is partly the work of makeup Michelangelo Toni G, who gave the actress thinnedout eyebrows, a blotchy spray of freckles, and dentures that fix her mouth in a perpetual grimace. It's as if life has made Wuornos ugly, imprinting its nastiness on her face so that even when she smiles, she's still sneering; not since Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has makeup so effectively brought home the central themes of a movie.

But equal credit goes to an astounding performance by Theron. Before becoming an actress, Theron danced with the Joffrey Ballet, and she has a dancer's fluency in body language. Her Aileen inhabits a pose of swaggering toughness--bouncing on the soles of her feet like a boxer, tossing her hair back with a violent jerk of her head. The over-the-top posturing constitutes Aileen's way of confronting a world that insults, rejects, and exploits her at every turn. Life at the lowest level of the sex trade is a nightmare in which even the protectors become predators, like the cop who picks Wuornos off the street, takes her to a deserted parking garage, and coerces sex. When one of her johns drives her to an ominously remote hideaway in the woods, where he turns out to be a vicious sexual sadist, the latent violence of Wuornos's life becomes horrifyingly explicit.

An unfolding irony of Monster lies in how Wuornos, severely damaged by male violence, adopts a pose of male bellicosity. Determined to quit hooking, she endures a round of fruitless job interviews that invariably end in humiliation; next, we see her in a bar, tossing back shots of whisky and boasting about how she dissed the interviewers. By having a woman act it out in near-caricature, Monster captures the essence of both male braggadocio and the deep insecurity beneath it. This film about two road-tripping lesbians is really, at its heart, a film about men.

And about the soul-killing nature of violence. Wuornos becomes a killer out of dire self-defense; but the act lets out a howling accumulation of rage that propels her toward more. With each killing Wuornos becomes less discriminating in her choice of victim, until at the end she kills a good Samaritan who stops not to pick her up, but to help. In so doing, Monster would have us believe, she destroys herself as well, extinguishing a flame of hope that has flickered inside her all her life. In court Wuornos is ultimately condemned to die, but Jenkins makes it clear that well before she was condemned, she was already damned.

Several people familiar with the real-life Wuornos have challenged Monster's portrayal of her as a tragic character. In the Washington Post, her biographer, Sue Russell, has argued that the real-life Wuornos killed coldly, out of a sociopathic desire for money and fame. Wuornos was "irredeemably dangerous," Russell writes, a ruthless robber and murderer; and "that's a truth not even Hollywood should pretty up." Russell blames political correctness--Jenkins's desire to fit the story into the mold of women's victimization and reactive violence--for Monster's "distortions." But I think she misses the point. Jenkins's film isn't merely a prettying up. From a spiritual standpoint (and, yes, a cinematic one), the irredeemably dangerous are uninteresting. What grabs our moral imagination and elicits our moral dread is humanity in motion--downward motion--rather than humanity obliterated. The stone-cold serial murderer may make for a sinister tabloid tale, ripped from the headlines; but art aims at tragedy, and that's a story ripped from the heart.

Marion Comer's Northern Ireland drama, Boxed, addresses the dilemma of "tame" priests, those who agree to take last confessions from informants about to be executed by the IRA. The film takes place in the dingy basement of an IRA safe house, where a quartet of armed IRA men (and one woman) are holding a man they believe has betrayed them. They set out to fetch a priest, but the gang member sent to the nearby church makes a mistake: rather than the elderly, "tame" Father Moran (Jim Norton), he returns with the young and idealistic Father Brendan (Tom Jordan Murphy). "You're to hear his last confession, Father," the leader commands, pushing the priest into a dim back room where a man sits beaten half-conscious, bound to a chair. "Help me, Father," the man moans. But how? Can you help someone by administering a sacrament that facilitates his execution? Father Brendan refuses. "You're not killing this man!" he shouts at the IRA gang. "You'll have to kill me as well! Now go home to your families and don't commit a mortal sin!"

The suspense of Boxed arises from the question of whether the IRA group will overcome their reluctance to kill a priest. But the underlying drama is theological. Comer, who wrote and also directed, explores the confrontation of pacifist priest and violent atheist, posing a message of love and forgiveness against one of vengeance and hate. "Where is your God now?" the most aggressive of the captors taunts Father Brendan, jamming his revolver against the priest's head. "Will he step in to stop this bullet?" The man's mocking bitterness, we learn, stems from having had a family member murdered by Protestant gangs. "Your God isn't listening," he mocks. "He's in the watching quietly business. All the little children being blown to bits. And he's just watching." As the IRA men recount their list of blood grievances, they reveal a vision of a world utterly divided into sides, guilty and innocent. "There are no sides!" Father Brendan blurts out at last. "We all come in the same way and go out the same way. It's all about the bit in between--what we do, and how we are to one another."

Boxed feels like a stage play, and some-what too neatly showcases its ideas. But the urgent drama of life and death transforms the sermonizing into eloquent grace under pressure. Though it won praise at film festivals last year, Boxed failed to get distributed, and fell into indie-film limbo. That's too bad, because despite its staginess, the film bit by bit gathers a powerful momentum, and ends by revealing both the bitter hopelessness of violence and the ardent, beating heart of mercy.