Monster's Ball (2001)
Here's my original review of this Oscar-winning film, one that reveals that I had a lot to learn about the evils still smoldering across America, evils that would soon flare up into wildfires.
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2025 Update: This review from the archives was first published on May 12, 2002. on the first version of the Looking Closer with Jeffrey Overstreet website.
I remember feeling like this movie was too difficult for me to review, its balance of strengths and weaknesses posing problems to my critical capacities and my conscience. I haven’t seen the movie since then, so I really don’t know what I would think of it now.
But the thing that stands out to me most about this review, now almost a quarter of a century after I wrote it, is that is reveals my ignorance about the prevalence and severity of racial prejudice in the post-Civil-War American South. Oh, I believed that the satanic hatred of racists had been a deadly disease, and I understood why the U.S. fell into Civil War. But at the turn of the millennium, I was too optimistic about how far we had come as a country.
And now, any ”progress” that was made is being violently undone by the GOP and the MAGA movement. The victories of the Civil Rights movement are being demolished before our eyes, and I have to look back at movies I thought were too extreme in their portrayals of evil and admit that, no, things really are that bad, and some of the villains I took to be exaggerated were actually not extreme enough to represent the depravity we’re confronted with today.
I remember feeling like this movie was too difficult for me to review, its balance of strengths and weaknesses posing problems to my critical capacities and my conscience. I haven’t seen the movie since then, so I really don’t know what I would think of it now.
But the thing that stands out to me most about this review, now almost a quarter of a century after I wrote it, is that is reveals my ignorance about the prevalence and severity of racial prejudice in the post-Civil-War American South. Oh, I believed that the satanic hatred of racists had been a deadly disease, and I understood why the U.S. fell into Civil War. But at the turn of the millennium, I was too optimistic about how far we had come as a country.
And now, any ”progress” that was made is being violently undone by the GOP and the MAGA movement. The victories of the Civil Rights movement are being demolished before our eyes, and I have to look back at movies I thought were too extreme in their portrayals of evil and admit that, no, things really are that bad, and some of the villains I took to be exaggerated were actually not extreme enough to represent the depravity we’re confronted with today.
In Monster’s Ball, Billy Bob Thornton plays Hank, a corrections officer carrying intense racial prejudice in one hand and a sidearm in the other. Hank’s aging father Buck (Peter Doyle) constantly reinforces the family’s race-hate, calling Sonny, Hank’s son, “weak” because he befriends their black neighbors.