So begins Monster, writer/director Patty Jenkins's new film about the most striking part of the life of Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute turned serial killer who was executed in October 2002. In just under a year beginning in December 1989, Wuornos killed seven men who picked her up hitchhiking. She said some of them, or all of them, tried to abuse her. But she also robbed them after she shot them-some of them shot in the back from several feet away.

Wuornos has been the subject of several video productions previously. British film maker Nick Broomfield has made two documentaries about Wuornos: Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) andAileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003). A made-for-TV movie, Overkill, appeared in 1994. The cable channels have several true-crime features about her. These films document her life history, her crimes, the investigation, the trial, and the legal process leading up to her execution.

Aileen Wuornos was called the first female serial killer, though this is far from true. There have been numerous others in the past, usually women killing for economic reasons. One such killer was Velma Barefield, put to death in 1984 for poisoning several elderly people in North Carolina. But Wuornos's sad story, angry demeanor, and her life in the sex trade made her a target for notoriety from the time of her arrest in 1991. Wuornos killed partly for money, but also partly for revenge, she said, striking back at abusive men out of her own sexual victimization.

None of the documentaries could tell Lee Wuornos's story as this one does, recreating time from the inside. None of them could convey the sense of urgency and desperation that drive her onward. It is difficult for me to think of another film that tells the story of a real criminal (as opposed to an outlandish caricature such as Hannibal Lecter) more powerfully, or more realistically. A friend of mine who wanted to see this film was afraid she would be disturbed by it. Good point: we ought to be disturbed by it, by what Lee Wuornos did and why she did it, just as we should be concerned if what the legal system did to her in return was right.

We see only a quick glimpse of Lee's childhood--a few pictures, her flashing her breasts to the neighborhood boys as an adolescent, sex in a car--but we suspect that her life as a child was not pretty, and that it centered on sex. She says later that she was raped at eight and beaten by her father when she told, had a baby at 13, and has been hooking ever since. She works the roads of central Florida, hitchhiking, taking rides with strangers, showing a picture of two children, talking about how she needs money to go visit them, and then negotiating with the men who offer her cash for quick sex.

This is no Pretty Woman, and Lee is no high-priced call girl. She is sun-blotched, soft and puffy, trash-mouthed, chain-smoking, and always cleaning the dirt from her body. Drunk half the time, she lives in a rental storage bin managed by her one friend, Thomas (Bruce Dern), washes up in gas station restrooms, and hangs out in biker bars. She displays the hard-bitten veneer of one who is used to being kicked around--someone who has been down so long everything looks up to her. Her persona is made up of equal parts pathos, substance-induced stupor, scrabbling for a dollar, and meaningless aphorisms that such people use to cope with their shitty lives: "Love conquers all" (no, it doesn't, it beats you down); "Look on the sunny side" (that's where other people are, but you can't go there); "Tomorrow is another day" (yeah, probably even worse than today). So it goes....

Lee, on the verge of suicide, meets Selby instead. Selby is loosely based on the real-life figure of Ty Moore, a grown-up, more-confirmed lesbian with whom Lee had a relationship lasting more than four years, from long before the killings until a month before her arrest. Ty was a born-again Christian who nevertheless stayed with a woman she knew was a murderer because she loved her. Selby is not nearly so complex.

Selby's old-fashioned parents have sent her from Ohio into exile in Florida for kissing another girl. She no more knows how to behave as a lesbian than Lee would know how to make it as a courtesan in Beverly Hills. But they drink together, spend time together, and by the second night, Lee, who is straight, is in love with Selby. After an evening of skating, they kiss and fondle each other outside the local roller rink. This is strange territory for Lee, not only gender-wise but emotionally. All she knows is sex; love is a fantasy.

Halle Berry won the Academy Award two years ago for her role as Letitia in Monster's Ball. What she was supposed to be good at was portraying a woman who wanted someone--anyone, apparently--to take care of her. She would have done great with Lee, who rises from the depths for her saving mission: to take care of Selby, the love of her life.

Lee has thoughts of being normal. She has done what it took to get by in life until she meets Selby, but falling in love reawakens her childhood dreams of home, a family, a job--a conventional life. She faces two prominent obstacles to achieving conventionality. First, she has been a prostitute for a long time. Second, to be a breadwinner, she needs money. When she goes out hooking, she meets the roadside hooker's worst nightmare--a serial killer who tortures and murders prostitutes. This was Aileen Wuornos's version of how her murders began. As it is represented here, this first killing is self-defense. The man has beaten her, tied her up, tortured her, and evidently intends to have more fun with her before he finally kills her. But to his misfortune, her hands come untied, she grabs her revolver, and she kills him before he can kill her.

Through the time of this first killing, Lee is only a hooker. She decides to leave hooking behind, settle down with Selby, and get a straight job. Of course she has no education, no training, no work history, a felony record, and the personality of a rabid dog. The way she smiles, you cannot sure if she is happy or if she is about to make a lunge for your throat. Potential employers can see the hazard of putting her to work in customer service. 

Lee might make a good fire watcher in a lonely tower in the wilderness, but this job never comes her way. She is begging for change on the street when a cop picks her up. Her crime spree could be over before it gets rolling. But, no, he only wants a blow job, too. When he drops her off, she sees in a trash bin a newspaper article about the man she killed. Police have no leads: she has gotten away with it, and she is loose on the streets. 

Casting conventionality aside, Aileen returns to hooking, but the hapless hooker has become the homicidal hooker. She seeks men who will be mean to her. She needs to feel the rage to kill. In the comics, the angry David Banner turns into "the Incredible Hulk." On the back roads of Florida, the angry Lee Wuornos turns into "the Incredible Whore." She curses, she screams, she shoots, and keeps shooting until her gun is empty, and then she loots her victims' wallets to get the money she needs to support Selby. 

This film does for roadside sex what road kill should do for small animals: warn you to avoid the road. Patty Jenkins captures the dismal nature of these brief encounters perfectly--a few words of set up, the search for seclusion off the road, the exchange of perfunctory services for wrinkled dollar bills. The director of photography, Steven Bernstein, deserves praise for the film's bleak landscapes-- the windowless taverns, cheap motel rooms, and dark highways where Lee and Selby talk of love and life, and Lee kills men wanting cheap sex.

The first one deserved it, if we believe this story. Lee's other victims are not so evil, though she would like to believe them so. They are just johns with their own quirky ways. When one man asks her to call him "Daddy" while they have sex, she asks, "Why, do you fuck your children?" Then she shoots him.

As I was wondering whether she turned into a terminating machine, methodically eliminating one would-be rapist after another, she displays her humanity by sparing the life of a stuttering neophyte who says this is his first time. He gets a hand job and says, "Thank you," never knowing he was this close to death. Lee cannot find the rage to kill him.

Her murderous rage is a terrible thing to behold. Although she picks up men to kill and rob them, she is anything but cold-blooded. She kills in a fire-hot angry passion that she has to talk herself into. Her killing state is a rage that leads to excess--the kind of excess that got Albert Camus's Meursault his death sentence in The Stranger, pumping five shots into the Arab on the beach when one would have been enough. When Lee opens fire, she keeps shooting until her gun is empty, pumping bullets into men already dead, just because she is so angry. When the jury hears the details of such of a crime, they would look at each other in horror and ask, "How could one human being do this to another?" Monster's greatest accomplishment is that it creates a state of mind providing a plausible answer to this question.

By the end of her spree, Lee's original motives--and her moral standards--have collapsed under the weight of dead men. As she becomes more practiced, she becomes the predator she once feared. She kills one man because she needs his car to leave town, only to discover that he is a cop of some kind, and his car is too "hot" to steal. She seeks out yet another victim, letting several potentials go by to get a better car. A Cadillac stops. The driver (Scott Wilson in a fine small part) offers a lift, and when she launches into her usual story about needing money to go visit her kids, he offers her a place to stay and whatever help she needs. He clearly was not looking for a prostitute. We can feel Aileen's frustration as she shoots him--kneeling, talking about his wife and his daughter about to have a baby, knowing he is about to die-just to shut him up. From the avenging angel she has turned into the killer of Good Samaritans.

To save Selby, Lee takes their getaway money and puts Selby on a bus back to Ohio, shortly before the police track Lee down at a biker bar. Selby repays her love by calling her in jail on a tapped phone and trying to get her to talk about the killings. Lee warns Selby not to say anything incriminating, and then she realizes it is too late--the police are using Selby to get her confession on tape. She gives her confession and accepts her death sentence at trial after Selby testifies against her. As the guards lead her from the courtroom to death row, Lee is reciting platitudes again--this time knowing they are lies.

When I think of Charlize Theron's performance in this film, two thoughts come to mind. First, it is hard to imagine this is an actress playing a part. The reality of her portrayal is so uncanny it is scary. Her Lee is childlike, profane, belligerent, damaged beyond repair, loving, hateful, and always on the edge-that frantic grin on her face. She is center stage all the time, propelling this film forward with her anger. Second, as we see her here, it is difficult to imagine Lee Wuornos as anything but a prostitute, she seems so perfectly suited to selling sex for money.

As Selby, lesbian ingenue, Christina Ricci is also good, though I would not say I know her so well. Selby is not fully formed; this is just a big adventure to her. Immature but knowing what she wants from Lee, Selby plays directly into Lee's manly protectiveness. She makes the perfect killer's girl friend. Just show me the money, and I won't ask how you got it. We are reminded that not all murderers are psychopathic loners; some are psychopathic partners in crimes that would not have happened if the partners had not come together.

We can wonder what would have happened to Lee without Selby. Was it abuse that did her in, or was it love? Lee's last loving act is to free Selby from criminal guilt--to allow the one person she loves to remain free. For Lee Wuornos, dying becomes another way of loving, and death row is the perfect career she was always searching for.

The worst problem with this film, if you know Aileen Wuornos's real story, is that film and real life do not coincide. It stands the murder story on its head, turning it into a love story, and distorting both. The representation of time is a concern, too. Director Jenkins--in portraying Lee's anguished spirit-has compressed Lee's history into a too brief period of time, making it appear that all this happened in a matter of a few days, or weeks.

Monster is up-close-and-personal, tightly focused on Lee's world view. People who objected to the approach used in telling the story of John Nash, in A Beautiful Mind, would probably also find this film's subjectivity hard to accept. We know that something like these events happened. Is this "what-might-have-been" version, as envisioned by Patty Jenkins and carried out in a tour de force performance by Charlize Theron, credible? In the end, it seems far more coherent and rational-in its recounting of motivations and circumstances-than what actually occurred. The film is more sane-keeping its focus on love and abuse-than the life it considers.

It was hard to tell what was true about Aileen Wuornos's killing spree by the time she was executed. People close to her have suggested that she was next door to nuts at the end of her life. After 11 years on death row, she had had enough, or too much. Her trial lawyer, Billy Nolas, said she was the "most disturbed individual I have ever represented." Film maker Nick Broomfield, who did the last interview with Wuornos, said she had "totally lost her mind." Her last words, in the execution chamber of the prison in Starke, Florida, would surely give you pause: "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock (Jesus) and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I'll be back." Strapped to a table, her fairy tale dreams snuffed out by chemical asphyxiation, Lee Wuornos's hell on earth was over-seven dead men late.