White-hot trash

Vibrating with the intensity of a recently struck tuning fork, her forearms working back and forth as her hamfists punch at the air, her heavy legs speed-shuffling on a scrap of asphalt, her thin top lip bulging as she chews the cud of total misery, her lank pelt swinging in the humid Florida air, her gorge rising to meet another mouthful of beer, her near eyebrow-free forehead knotted with surly incomprehension, her mouth twisting around a filter tip to utter another string of sad, dreary expletives. Charlize Theron's hyper-kinetic rendition of the physical and psychic reality of Aileen Wuornos, abused prostitute turned serial killer, is a tour de force.

So many cinematic performances rely for their effects on the collision between the wide angle of notoriety and the tight focus of the camera, that when a savage portrayal such as this happens along, the naysayers are only too willing to condemn it on the most ridiculous basis.

In Theron's case, it's that she gained weight, she dared to look unattractive, and, in an unthinkable reversal, used make-up and prosthetics to mask her natural loveliness. It's as if the camera's lens were only allowed one kind of distortion, from better-than-average to ideal, anything else is some unholy gimmickry.

In fact, the Wuornos story simply wouldn't make any sense without Theron's anti-maquillage. Not that the woman was by any means spectacularly ugly, she just was what she was: a white-trash girl, sexually abused as a child, pregnant at 13, orphaned and disowned by her family at 14, then condemned for the balance of her "free" life to the most frightening and dehumanising kind of prostitution.

A hardened woman, Wuornos walked the soft verges of the Florida freeways hooking whatever drive-by johns she could, the perverts and the anxious performers, the repressed and the rapists.

When the inevitable happened and a john beat her, then tied her up, before making it abundantly clear that he was going to murder her once he had completed his sickening violation, Wuornos struck a queer kind of luck. She grabbed the gun in his car and shot him to death.

In Patty Jenkins's film the initial killing is a wholly justified homicide, and the six that follow are the vile lobster pot of ingress that Wuornos is unable to reverse out of. So Christina Ricci as Wuornos's fateful girlfriend, Selby Wall, plays the part of literal jail bait; unable to comprehend the way that her demands for good times - and the money to pay for them - are egging her homicidal lover on.

Not that Jenkins shirks from showing the savagery of the murders, we get them in all their extempore-obscenity: the parked car in the dark wood, the man with his trousers at half-mast, either threatening or importuning as his brains are blown out. And nor does Jenkins paint Wuornos as a peculiarly compassionate killer: yes, one tyro john is spared, but a retired cop seeking paid-for sex because his wife is crippled, and a family man who is only trying to help her, are both blown filthily away.

Yet I can't help but feel that only a woman auteur could bring quite the right level of empathy to the Wuornos story. The egregious documentary-maker Nick Broomfield has had two, equally unsatisfactory, shakes of the tale. Films which, while ostensibly trying to demystify the tabloid portrayal of Wuornos as a monstrous aberration - a female Bundy or Nilsen - ended up as further exercises in Broomfield bigging himself up.

Jenkins, however, with Theron as her proxy, demonstrates what we all know to be the awful truth: violence is a deficiency disease, a grotesque stratagem devised by those who are denied love. The critics of Theron's performance and of the overall tone of this film are only echoing the misogyny that branded Wuornos a "monster" before she went to her state-sanctioned death.