Aileen Wuornos is often hailed as "America's first female serial killer." She was a prostitute who killed seven men in the late 80's and was executed in 2002. As a true crime buff, I have seen my share of dramatizations of her life as well as many interviews and documentaries with the real woman. Watching Charlize Theron play Wuornos was eerie. She nailed her vocal intonations, the mannerisms, the body language. I've seen a host of other films about serial killers; but I always knew, for example, that I was watching Mark Harmon and not Ted Bundy or that I was watching Tommy Lee Jones and not Gary Gilmore. With Monster, it was hard to make the distinction between Theron and Wuornos.

Writer and director Patty Jenkins spent time with the real Aileen Wuornos and had access to some of her private letters. Jenkins focuses on the one question that comes to mind with every serial killer: Why? Jenkins quickly moves through the childhood and adolescence of Wuornos and gets to the heart of the story. When we meet the adult Aileen, she's contemplating suicide on a highway underpass. When she accidentally stumbles into a gay bar, she meets the woman who will help to seal her fate, Selby Wall (Christina Ricci). Selby is coming to grips with her own lesbianism and her family's refusal to accept it. In part to shock her family and in part because she really does love Wuornos, they take off together. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship with Wuornos playing the protector and the defender and Selby all too willing to play the dependent and needy role.

The first murder really was self-defense when Wuornos was to raped and brutalized by a deranged john. But, after that it became easier and easier for her to defend herself. The problem was that she was defending herself before there was anything to defend. She would also rob her victims, sharing the money and the cars with an at-first clueless Shelby. First ignorant, then in denial, and finally as a partner in crime, Ricci plays the naïve 18-year old with first innocence and then awareness. She was a bit whiny at times, but then again so was the character she was based on.