"Monster"

The hub of "Monster" is the love story between Aileen and the young woman she's fallen for, Selby (Christina Ricci), who has fled her excessively religious family in Ohio to find a bit of adventure, or something like it, in Florida. The two hook up one evening in a Daytona Beach gay bar. Aileen has wandered in, either not knowing or pretending not to know what kind of a place it is. Selby, as perky and open as a baby bird, sidles up to her, hoping to talk to her, and you wonder why: Aileen's face is a pale, freckled mask with all emotions save defensiveness clamped out of it.

When Aileen speaks, the words tumble out of a mouth that's permanently turned down at the corners, making every syllable sound profane and belligerent. You get the sense it's her true nature to be gregarious and regular (she calls everyone, male and female alike, "man"), but her innate friendliness has been calcified by caution. Her eyes, deep brown and framed by invisible blond eyebrows, are unnervingly pupilless. They can't be read.

Somehow, though, Selby coaxes Aileen into coming home and sharing a bed with her, platonically. Selby is staying with some friends of her family's; they've given her a small room. Selby, most likely intuiting that Aileen is homeless (Ricci is so subtle that she knows better than to let us hear the "click"), suggests that she might like to take a shower. She lends her some pajamas with playing cards on them. Aileen emerges cautiously from the bathroom, her long, weighty limbs sticking out awkwardly through the sleeves and legs of the cozy flannel, as if she were a kid dressed up in an alien's costume at Halloween.

And from there, the love story in "Monster" proceeds, at first tentatively and then with rushing tenderness -- the inevitable tragedy will come later, but the strange and beautiful bubble that encases the lovers in the movie's first hour is what makes its characters so devastatingly real to us. As Selby and Aileen lie in bed, stiffly, like side-by-side soldiers, Selby makes a gentle, sincere overture: "I can't believe you're here," and then, "You're so pretty." The words seem meant for a different woman from the one who's actually in the bed: We can't yet see any beauty in Aileen, who's closed up tight like a fist. But the moment is like a dormant paper flower that doesn't open until a few scenes later -- we see that Selby was a step or two ahead of us, and as Aileen comes around to the idea that for the first time in her life she might actually be loved, she begins to look like something approaching beautiful.

Ricci is a sometimes marvelous actress who, most recently, has too often coasted on being voluptuously cute. But she doesn't coast here. As Ricci plays her, Selby is a delicate calibration of generosity and selfishness; the flip side of her childlike neediness is a potential for treachery. Ricci and Theron look so comfortable in their love scenes that the affair between Aileen and Selby, unlikely as it seems on the surface, makes perfect sense.

Jenkins stresses its fragility as much as its passion. When the two make love for the first time, holed up in a dingy motel room, Jenkins sets the scene to Tommy James and the Shondells' "Crimson and Clover," the wistfulness of the song curling around the lovers like a leafy canopy. Even when Jenkins cuts the scene -- we next see Aileen and Selby moving out of the crummy little motel room and into a crummy little rented house -- she doesn't cut the music. The song, which begins in a honeymoon hideaway and ends in a cottage built, miserably, for two, follows them like an echo, its last strains the tail end of their happiness.

By that point, we've already had a glimpse of Aileen's fierceness, and her ability to pull the trigger even on men who haven't abused her is that much more frightening in light of the desperate tenderness she shows with Selby. Theron gives us a character we can neither approve of nor turn away from: We have to hang on to both her vulnerability and her cruelty simultaneously. There's no simplifying her.

You won't be alone if you find yourself ruthlessly scrutinizing Theron's performance at first. The prosthetics and the weight gain render her almost unrecognizable -- who wouldn't wonder if they're just part of a stunt? In the movie's first half hour, it's impossible not to fixate on Theron's crooked, too-yellow teeth, the puffiness of her jaw line, the way the extra weight has settled around her neck, upper arms, midriff and thighs as comfortably as if it's always been there. But Theron inhabits Aileen's skin so convincingly that I'm certain she could have done it even without the weight gain, precisely because it took me so little time to look past the extra pounds -- to look right past anything resembling actorly technique, for that matter. Theron renders technique invisible, which is the whole point. Her expressiveness is heartbreaking: Aileen is a recessive, self-protective character, but Theron lets us look right inside, as if we're privy to a secret. It's one of the most intimate performances I've ever seen on-screen.

I hate to talk about "Monster" as Theron's breakthrough movie, the one in which she proves she's "really" an actress. Theron has already shown a confident, intelligent spark in pictures like "The Cider House Rules" and "The Italian Job." But as with plenty of other actresses in Hollywood, her beauty has been something of a liability. Face it: A starlet isn't an actress until she's proved otherwise. (Which is part of the reason, I'm sure, that Kidman was compelled to wear the phony nose, despite the fact that she'd already proved herself without it in pictures like "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Moulin Rouge.")

The physicality of Theron's performance reminded me of Laurence Olivier's in "Othello": He moved like a man three times his size, his gait rolling and lumbering and overtly sexual. Theron holds Aileen's suffering clenched in her frame. She moves like a man; her swagger is motored by false bonhomie. (Not that Aileen and Selby play out any stereotypical butch-femme roles. Aileen isn't so much a "male" lover to Selby as she is a father figure -- as if she were striving to be the father she herself never had.)

Theron's performance has so many fine gradations, particularly as Aileen's wariness of Selby falls away. The muscles around her mouth relax and soften just a bit; her eyes seem warmer, although they remain depthless -- you can never see to the bottom of them. Both Theron's performance and the movie's aura of doomed romance (they're inseparably entwined) haunted me for days. And one early scene in particular, in which Aileen and Selby meet up at a roller-skating rink, has stuck with me for weeks.

Up to this point, Selby has taken the lead, hoping to draw Aileen out. It hasn't worked too well: We can see how withdrawn and guarded Aileen is, even though we know she likes Selby very much. Aileen may have zero confidence, but she does know how to skate. She coaxes Selby, who doesn't, out onto the floor, and the two whirl around to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," Aileen bobbing and gliding along, urging the much clumsier Selby to "feel the music."

Aileen doesn't fit into the world, and yet she's at home, and temporarily very, very happy, in a roller-skating rink, where she can fly on wheels instead of lugging the weight of her lifetime on her back. In the context of what happens to Aileen later, the scene is almost unbearably painful. But for those few moments, she fits right in, gliding along to a song she loves, and just for that space of time, taking the words to heart.

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