Is This a True Portrait of a Southern Black Woman? Hardly

In the wake of its Academy Award nominations for screenplay and actress, let me register my profound distress at this latest in a considerable line of accolades bestowed on the film “Monster’s Ball.” Contrary to the consensus critical view that the film is a moving story of the redemptive power of love, I found little to recommend it.

The story (stop here if you don’t want the film “spoiled” for you) is basically this: A rather matter-of-factly racist Georgia prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) assists in the very graphically depicted (smoke rising from burning flesh) electrocution of a black prisoner. Following a series of plot developments, this same guard becomes acquainted with and then the lover of the widow (Halle Berry) of the executed man. The widow, also African American, is shown as brazenly seeking and initiating the intimacy.

The film ends with the woman discovering her new lover’s role in her husband’s death. Her reaction? She joins her “good ol’ boy” in sharing a bowl of chocolate ice cream (his favorite food) sitting on the back stoop of his house where she has recently come to live with him. And, one presumes, they lived happily ever after in their small Georgia town.

Now, to be fair, important plot elements that arguably contextualize and shape the actions and motivations of the two main characters are not part of my plot summary. Both characters are, presumably, adrift, spiritually alone and in pain. They reach out to one another for solace more than sex. Their union is a modern triumph of love over circumstance, including traditional racial social barriers. “Behold,” say the critics, “the New South cometh, and it is good!”

That is as misleading, revisionist and reactionary a view of black-white race relations in this country as has been put on the screen in a long time. My reaction to “Monster’s Ball” is as close as I can imagine to my great-grandparents’ likely reaction to “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, assuming the unlikely availability of theater seats for “colored people” like them to see it in their Mississippi and Georgia hometowns at the time.

Simply and bluntly, the film is a Ku Klux Klan fantasy: A poor white racist gets to “legally lynch” a black man (conveniently depicted as a triple murderer who proclaims himself a “bad man”), then takes the dead man’s dream woman, at her invitation (no rape necessary), and, finally, gets her acquiescence if not outright approval of his killing of her black man.

Some people with whom I have discussed the film have accused me of wanting any depiction of blacks in films or television to be “positive” and “uplifting.” “Monster’s Ball,” they argue, is a work of dramatic art, and art has no dramatic “arc” if the main protagonists are perfect people doing only good, smart things. This argument is quite beside the point. I maintain that the greatest black character in American fiction is Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” published in 1940. Bigger was also a murderer, and not a nice person. He was also executed. But Bigger rang true; his all-too-human failings had an authenticity borne of the reality of black oppression in the rural South and urban North of this country in the first half of the 20th century. Bigger still rings true.

My objection to “Monster’s Ball” is not that the three main black characters are deeply flawed people. (The decidedly dysfunctional black couple has a son, a grossly obese, compulsive eater who is treated very cruelly by his mother.) Rather, my problem with the film is that the story doesn’t ring true.

I know the South is not as it was in my youth in the 1950s and ‘60s, but even in 2002, the prison guard and the black woman in this film would not, I believe, act as they do.

That is not to say interracial love, even white male-black female love, is impossible in such a context. History clearly reports otherwise. But this depiction of it, in my view, provides no supporting context. The guard has had no life-changing experience with blacks. The woman strips and offers herself to a poor, powerless, Southern white man she barely knows while still, supposedly, in deep grief over the sudden death of her son hard on the death of the boy’s father.

Incredibly and insultingly, the film argues that the woman sees sudden, unprotected, nearly anonymous sex with a man who probably questions her humanity as a “balm” for her grief. This is simply not my experience of Southern black women, not in my youth and not now, a half-century later.

Why then, I ask myself, is this madness seen as Oscar material? Perhaps its appeal to the motion picture academy is, indeed, its bogus “reassurance” of American social reconciliation and harmony in a time of national crisis, as some film critics have posited.

Ultimately, what rankles most is that this film got made while so many others, with depictions of people of color, women, the old, the poor, the powerless, as they really are in this society, good and bad, don’t get made or, if somehow independently produced, barely see distribution.

As so many have said before me, censorship or insipid, unconvincing “after school specialism” isn’t what’s needed. A diversity of views is. Real diversity means diverse access to mainstream film distribution and prime-time television programming slots, not just festival screenings, obscure art house runs and “boutique” cable exposure. Of course, power that could deliver such results isn’t given. It must be taken, or, at least, be alternatively created.

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Eugene Boggs is a member of the Screen Actors Guild’s board of directors, co-chair of the AFTRA-SAG ethnic employment opportunity committee and a professor at the University of West Los Angeles School of Law in Inglewood.