Dramatized legal brief on behalf of the bisexual streetwalker and serial killer and (outside the scope of the movie) death-penalty cause célèbre, Aileen Wuornos, who just wanted, like anyone else, to love and be loved and of course, as per the first-person voice-over at the outset, "be in the movies." (Well, one out of three, at least.) The title, you will gather, is ironic. Already a sometime hooker but not a killer when she discovers her inner lesbian with a broken-winged college girl, she goes back on the streets only to fund her budding relationship, to buy a little privacy. As depicted, the first killing is unambiguously an act of kill-or-be-killed self-defense, to cap off a graphic bout of torture at the hands of a misogynistic john. In truth, the killing is far more understandable than the relationship. What's the attraction, on either side, between this boisterous prole and this timorous slummer? A falling-in-love montage to the accompaniment of the goopy old Tommy James & The Shondells tune, "Crimson and Clover," will not help to clear this up; and it is particularly hard to swallow the notion that a novice lesbian would be quite so open, so confident, so defiant about it in public. Her concurrent murder spree has been carefully calibrated to distance her, a step at a time, from sympathy. She lets one john off the hook, early on, because he has never done this sort of thing before and she takes pity on him. She kills another who turns out, through a photo in his wallet, to have a wife in a wheelchair and thus a good excuse. And she kills one who is not a john at all -- the final straw -- but a Good Samaritan who offers her money for nothing and a warm bed at home with his wife. With that, all bases are covered, as well as the ass of the writer and director Patty Jenkins: plenty of wiggle room whether accused of playing softball or hardball. Quite apart from any bestowal and withdrawal of sympathy, the protagonist emerges as nothing so much as a cat's-paw for Charlize Theron, a stepping-stone to one of those total-transformation performances -- one of those big bold bravura jobs -- that maintain maximum separation between the player and the role, and are commonly mistaken for the farthest reaches of the art of acting. Perhaps in a sense they truly are, but in reaching so far they irretrievably throw off the balance. Porked up for the part, not nearly to the dimensions of De Niro in Raging Bull but easily to those of Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary, wearing a denture as obtrusive as a prizefighter's mouthpiece, sporting a galaxy of freckles suggestive of an accident under the sunlamp, shifting her weight in perpetual motion, compulsively smoking, swigging, gesticulating, and generally carrying on like a junkie overdue for a fix, Theron creates a problem of scale, such that her ostensible partner, poor little wasted-away Christina Ricci, has roughly the presence of a pet parrot. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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