Monster's Ball | South China Morning Post
Thornton stars as Hank, a racist prison guard given the last watch over the condemned Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Coombs). Also on that last watch is Hank's son Sonny (Heath Ledger) and the tension between the pair is palpable. They share a house with Hank's father Buck (Peter Boyle), a bigoted old man who is dying of emphysema. As you can tell, life in general in this film is not exactly a bundle of laughs.
When tragedy strikes Hank he completely loses the plot. He quits work and falls into depression and it is then that he runs into Letica (Berry), a down-and-out single mother who just happens to be Musgrove's widow. When Letica suffers a further loss, the pair are thrown together and forced to come to terms with their relationship - and the changes they are each going through.
While there are some aspects of the script here that need more development - why, for instance, there is so much anger between Hank and Sonny - the remarkable efforts from Berry and Thornton lift it all well above the ordinary. Berry's Oscar-winning effort is bubbling to the boil with passion and anger while there's no one better than Thornton at playing a man mired in misery. And a welcome return to the big screen for Boyle rounds out an impressive second effort from director Marc Forster.
The extras: As with most DVD packages, the deleted scenes included here do nothing more than show you why they were deleted in the first place - it's usually because they're not very good. There are two audio commentaries - one from the director and cinematographer and the other from the director and the two leads, which includes some hilarious anecdotes from Thornton. The real surprises come in the 'behind the scenes' section in which Thornton shines bright, constantly trying to put his fellow cast members off their game. And there's a brilliant scene in which he slips seamlessly out of his Hank character and into that oddball Karl he created for Sling Blade (1996).
The verdict: OK, it's a tough ride - but it's well worth seeing through to the end.
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