About half an hour into this film I turned to my companion and said, "The director has to be European." The characters in Monster's Ball are like the lost souls wandering through European art films--completely cut off from real life. As it turns out, Marc Forster is from Europe, and what he has given us in Monster's Ball is an obliquely European perspective on life, love (or sex), and death among blacks and white in the almost contemporary South.

Monster's Ball is set in a fictitious Georgia State Penitentiary (not the real Georgia State Penitentiary at Reidsville, which looks nothing like this) and Jackson (not the real Jackson, Georgia), a small town nearby. The time is nearly present day, though in this town race relations seem stuck in the 1950s. We do not see that much of the town or get much of a sense of place. Most of the action takes place in the prison, in the characters' homes, and in an all-night diner, always a likely gathering place for the hardcore alienated.

Billy Bob Thornton is Hank Grotowski, a security colonel at the prison. Other than perpetual belligerence, he has no discernible personality. He lives on chocolate ice cream and coffee. His only two human contacts are his semi-invalid, wholly racist retired prison guard father, Buck, played by Peter Boyle, and his inexperienced, sympathetic, "weak" prison guard son, Sonny, briefly played by Heath Ledger.

Hank is in charge of the penitentiary's execution team, which Sonny has recently joined. In the real world of executions, Sonny would not be here. More proven and trustworthy officers would make up this team. In the movie world of the execution, Sonny's failure to perform acceptably as a member of the team is the plot device that makes the rest of the movie happen.

Halle Berry plays Leticia Musgrove, the wife of Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Combs), the inmate awaiting execution. Coronji Calhoun is Tyrell, their terribly obese son (Where do his fat genes come from, by the way, with such handsome, normal parents). The most passionate love scenes in Monster's Ball are between Tyrell and the candy bars he hides around the house.

Despite its title, which is a reference to the pre-execution party allowed the well-to-do condemned in early modern England, this is not a death penalty film. Puffy Combs's Musgrove is not a monster. We know that he has been on death row eleven years for a triple murder; we know that he likes to draw and loves his son (and that his wife cares nothing about him); then we see the execution team carry out its work, which really gets the ball rolling.

The physical setting of the first part of the film looks exactly right (except in a different state) because the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola provided the real death row, the real death house and execution chamber, and the real electric chair, which has been housed in the Angola Museum after its retirement in 1991. If you like this look, you should see The Farm, a much better documentary film about Angola made three years ago. It is true to life.

Except for the electrocution itself, the execution process in Monster's Ball is all wrong. Executions today involve lots of participants. The condemned man has extended family visits and telephone calls. Lawyers and spiritual advisors are running around. The last few hours are full of busying distractions. Executions are orderly rituals, but they are part of a larger world. This execution appears to take place in a vacuum.

The people of Monster's Ball move in a minimalist world where no one knows anything about anyone else. Maybe this is director Forster's view of small Southern towns; it is certainly not mine. In the towns that I am familiar with, everyone knows everyone's business. Only prisons have a faster grapevine.

One of the improbabilities of Monster's Ball is that Hank and Leticia have moved in the same small circle for eleven years but apparently have never met or never even heard of each other. This film is marked by the astonishing number of coincidences, incongruities, and complete reversals that are necessary to make it work.

The strangest twist puts Hank and Leticia together in a vulnerable moment. Despite being thoroughly unlikable and having lived such singularly disconnected lives, having no chemistry, and knowing nothing about each other, they come together in howlingly passionate lovemaking. Then, when they realize what they have done, instead of coughing embarrassedly and excusing themselves to return to their very different existences, they decide they are meant for each other--Leticia because she "needs someone to take care of her" and Hank because he has no one else. This is a painful scene to watch, not because of its emotional intensity but because of its utter preposterousness.

For gratuitous sex, the film throws in a second explicit sex scene between Hank and Leticia. I wondered why. To show off Berry's fine body again? To show that Hank, who has graciously performed oral sex on Leticia, even though Southern white men do not usually do such acts, is truly committed to the relationship? Or only to provide an excuse for Hank to go out for another drive around in search of chocolate ice cream, allowing Leticia to wander through the house until she discovers what any minimally-alert human would have known from the beginning --that Hank had killed her man (whom she cared nothing about anyway, remember)? This is completely convoluted, but at least in their estranged world no one is likely to notice--no one is close enough to care.

Aside from their naked bodies, neither Billy Bob Thornton nor Halle Berry has much to show us in this film. Their characters are bitter epigrams. Puffy Combs is thoughtful and sensitive as the husband who is executed early in the film, though just about any actor--black or white--who is capable of looking somber as he contemplates being electrocuted could have played the part. Peter Boyle, who plays Hank's father as a mean, senile version of his role in Young Frankenstein, has several good lines, but he seems no more real than anyone else.

The most interesting characters are the ones with small parts: Vera, the blond prostitute who fucks both the son and the father (in the same position and the same motel, though not at the same time), and Cooper, the black mechanic, who manages to remain amazingly calm after learning that Hank has chased his sons away by firing a shotgun into the air.

At the end, as Hank and Leticia sit on the steps eating ice cream and pondering their future together in the stars, I was hoping the film would take a different turn. I wanted Letitia to take out Sonny's gun, shoot Hank in the head and then stick the gun barrel in her mouth to kill herself. This would have been a more likely and appropriate way out of the misery they had both lived for so long. 

The film's final scene would be the old captain, monstrous Buck Grotowski, in his red beret, standing over Hank's grave. As he babbles on about the effects of "black pussy" on the ethics of professional "corrections officers," the scene dissolves to the American flag waving in the breeze. This is the kind of alienated social commentary the great European directors used to strive for.