Christina Ricci and Charlize Theron find love before the killing starts in 'Monster.' Monster Starring Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci. Written and directed by Patty Jenkins. Rated R.

It sounds like a recipe for disaster, casting Charlize Theron to star in a biography of serial killer Aileen Wuornos. The long-legged, curvaceous, apple-cheeked actress hasn't done much in a busy career except look hot in Hollywood flicks and paparazzi photos. In the indie film Monster, she goes a tried-and-true route among beautiful movie stars; with some 30 pounds of additional body weight and the cosmetological magic of makeup artist Toni G, she looks like something that crawled up from the muck. The resemblance, both physical and vocal, to the real-life Wuornos is truly startling.

Yet when I think of Theron's work here -- and I suspect I'll be recalling it far into the future -- it isn't her sagging physique and damaged skin and wrung-out hair that I remember most vividly. It's the crazed desperation that flashes in her eyes on the many occasions when Wuornos' life takes a bad turn. It's the look of someone who's closer to a wild animal than a human being, capable of responding to love and compassion but too battered and paranoid to avoid lashing out violently. That feral quality is the key to an astounding transformation that burns itself into your memory.

Inaccurately labeled as the first female serial killer, the real-life Wuornos murdered seven of her johns in the years 1989-90, the culmination of an appalling early life of homelessness and sexual violence that went far beyond the pale of ordinary child abuse. This semifictionalized bio begins with highway prostitute "Lee" Wuornos walking into a lesbian bar on a rainy Florida day. She intends to spend her last five dollars and then kill herself, but instead she meets Selby (Christina Ricci), a lonely closet case who's under the thumb of her Christian fundamentalist dad. At first the film plays as an odd, beautiful romance between these two lost souls.

It's not to last. In a scene that's harrowing even by the standard of other cinematic rape scenes, Lee encounters an extensively psychotic guy (Lee Tergesen) who ties her up and sodomizes her before she gets free and shoots him. The incident sets demons loose in her head that were better left undisturbed. Plagued by delusions that all her johns are out to do something similar to her, she lures the men out to secluded roadside spots and kills them for their money and the temporary use of their cars.

Theron gives an intensely physical performance here, carrying herself menacingly with the extra weight on her tall frame. Her previous training as a ballerina shows in the extraordinary way she moves -- watch how she sits at a bar and signals for a beer. The more turbulent scenes find her ferocious and uninhibited, flailing and howling at the sky after her first murder or reeling around a motel room in despair and finally collapsing into a pile on the floor after confessing to Selby. (Being unhinged isn't entirely new for Theron -- she unleashed the same wildness as a mentally disintegrating housewife in the 1997 schlockfest The Devil's Advocate.) Few other actors in recent films have captured their characters' essences so well simply through movement.

More than that, she vividly draws a portrait of psychological damage and homicidal mania bleeding into each other. Late in the film, Lee gives the "I screwed up everything" speech as she puts Selby on a bus to get her away from the cops, and the incoherent torrent of words and sounds that spills out of Theron is terribly real to witness.

It's a shame Ricci can't rise to her co-star's heights, as Chlo‘ Sevigny rose to meet Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry, one of this movie's spiritual antecedents. Ricci is appropriately needy and whiny, but we never see her Selby responding to Lee's lovable characteristics. Ricci's so emotionally shallow that we don't understand why she chooses to stay with someone she discovers to be a murderer. She's a major reason why the film isn't a full-fledged masterpiece.

Making her feature film debut, writer-director Patty Jenkins works in a plain, straightforward style and has a good eye for the rural Florida setting. She delivers a nightmarish sequence in which Lee tries to reform and botches a series of job interviews while wearing the worst-looking thrift-store business suit imaginable. Even more painful is a scene in which Lee has to kill a kind old man who doesn't want sex with her and offers to help her. (The man is played movingly by Scott Wilson, who portrayed one of the roadside killers in Richard Brooks' 1967 film In Cold Blood, another one of this movie's ancestors.) Jenkins never trivializes the horror of Lee's murders, but she also renders Lee's twisted humanity in such strokes as to make her pitiable and human.

By showing this kind of empathy, she makes her film part of the same tradition as the greatest all-time serial-killer movies: Fritz Lang's M, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. (The other movie in this class, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, works differently by having the killer himself empathize with the investigator.) Ultimately, Monster lacks the final ounce of formal discipline that makes those classics so devastating, but simply being within hailing distance of them is a tremendous achievement for this piercing, revelatory piece of work.

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.

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