Monster' Ball: repeated violences

Monster's Ball is an excellent movie about violence, not just the episodic one portrayed in the news, but the intimate violence of each one of us that reflects social violence that repeats patterns of domination and is justified by the very tradition of historical errors that commits.

Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry are the protagonists like Hank and Leticia, inhabitants of a small town of Georgia in the 1990s. The two have nothing in common, except that Hank is the policeman who electrocuted her ex-husband in the electric chair (they didn't know at first about the connection).

The terrific script by Milo Addica and Will Rokos does not label anyone, and neither "softens" the characters' reputation. They do, not what they should, but only what they can do.

Hank repeats his father Buck (Peter Boyle), a racist police officer who has a significant influence on him even if he is attached to a walker. The same does not happen with his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), a friend of black boys and in a way similar to his mother and grandmother, who could not endure the family "disease."

Leticia is a clumsy waitress, an alcoholic, an unbalanced mother, and is about to lose her home for not paying the rent. When she takes her son Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun) for his last visit to his father, Lawrence (Sean Combs), who will be executed the next day, no longer shows any affection.

By coincidence, the characters are in a moment of mourning for both. They have sex, but, contrary to what appears on the screen, it is about pain relief, two people trying to remove for a few moments everything that weighs on them. That's it.

From this point, they start a relationship marked more by psychological sanity than by love. There is no redemption in Hank's attitudes, only divestment in prejudice. External affects no longer seem to change both.

Director Marc Foster manages to make a perfect cut in the final scene in which Leticia discovers the relationship between Hank and the ex-husband's execution.

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