It was once said that the greatest get-out clause in modern cinema was the caption that opened the first Star Wars film - "A long time ago in a galaxy far away" establishes not only that the worlds depicted have no relation at all to our own, but that these events happened not in some version of our own future but in the past. In that simple statement George Lucas told his audience that in this world, anything goes, and if the fashions look dated, if a laser pistol looks like a WW2 Mauser, then that's because their universe developed completely differently from ours and the similarities are purely coincidental. But running a close second to this must be "Based on a true story," which effectively allows film-makers to take (a cynical view might be "trade off the notoriety of") a real-life character or event, and be 'creative' with it. The extent to which this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in part on the degree to which events and characters are drawn from reality: no-one really had issues with the fact that Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre bore an only passing resemblance to the activities of Ed Gein, but Oliver Stone has been repeatedly ticked off for juggling with the facts in movies such as JFK and Nixon.

Based as it is on the life of multiple killer Aileen Wuornos, or at least a small part of it, Monster carries the aforementioned disclaimer, but ultimately sets itself up as a true catalogue of the events that ultimately led to the arrest and execution of a woman who was wrongly dubbed 'America's first female serial killer'. Although the names of all of the characters except Wuornos have been changed, presumably because they are still alive (as far as the movie world is concerned, once you're dead you're fair game), many of the principal figures are drawn from real life, and the event timeline is, for the most part, fairly accurate. But debut writer-director Patty Jenkins, having apparently researched her movie thoroughly, still plays fairly loose with the truth, and, having adopted a specific viewpoint for her story, massages the facts somewhat through alteration and omission to avoid contradicting it. The result is a film that is at times impressive in its recreation of recorded events, and at others misleading, romanticised and, frankly, a little cheesy.

Wuornos's story is a complex one, and to this day much of it remains the subject of speculation, as whether she killed in self-defence or in cold blood has never been convincingly established. Wuornos always maintained that she was brutally raped by her first victim, Richard Mallory (credence was later given to this claim when it was revealed that Mallory had once spent five years in jail for violent rape in another state, but there was no retrial on the basis of this new evidence), that her other victims had either assaulted or attempted to assault her and that she was acting purely in self defence. Towards the end of her twelve years on death row she unexpectedly changed her plea, saying that she had killed them for their money only, but in their compelling documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, film-makers Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill cast considerable doubt on this, suggesting that she had altered her story in order to speed up her execution, unable as she was to cope any more with her death row existence.

It is these killings, and Aileen's relationship with her lover Tyria Moore (here renamed Selby), that form the crux of the film. Sure enough, it has all the ingredients of a solidly familiar teenage drama: a wrong 'un with a dark past meets the right girl and, despite the disapproval of the girl's guardians, the two run off together; the relationship changes both of their lives, but the past eventually catches up with them with tragic results, testing their love and ultimately destroying them. Of course the difference here is that both of the characters are women, and it is to the film's considerable credit that it presents their relationship as a perfectly natural and loving one, the problems that arise having nothing to do with gender or sexual preference. But even at this early stage the film has started to stray. The use of Aileen's POV voice-over heavily romanticises her grim childhood and her early days as a call girl - she was chasing a dream, the film suggests, and getting in cars with men not to make money after she was thrown out of home (living in the woods as she was, if a client took her to a motel it would offer her the chance to wash and get warm for a while), but because she believed any one of them might be movie producer who would 'discover' her and make her into a star. This also suggests a desire to be famous at all costs, a low-key speculation thrown in to the mix of Why Aileen Killed.

Cut (in a very nicely executed edit) to Aileen beneath an underpass contemplating suicide, and one last drink accidentally lands her in a gay bar and introduces her to Selby, a girl whose attempted pick-up she reacts angrily to, telling her in no uncertain terms that she is not of that persuasion. The movie chooses to use this awakening of her until-then undiscovered lesbianism as a turning point for Aileen, whereas in truth this was not her first gay relationship and it seems likely that she knew full well she was entering a gay bar, probably in search of the very companionship she found. What is not in dispute is the importance of the relationship with Tyria/Selby to Aileen - in a life that was characterised by abuse and exploitation, this was the only true love she ever knew.

It is the presentation of Selby that represents the film's schizophrenic attitude to the facts of the case. It's OK to present Wuornos as she was, a woman of earthy looks whose tough life is reflected in her face and attitude, in part because her case is so well documented, but also because of the presentation of her as an essentially masculine figure, where the values of aggression and toughness are more important than beauty. (This is symbolically represented through the substitution of the real-world Wuornos's .22 pistol with a .44 Magnum, the gun of choice for Dirty Harry and a favourite example of firearm as all-destroying phallus.) But we're still in an American movie with an audience demographic in mind, and so to balance this we have Christina Ricci's wide-eyed cuteness as Selby, a woman just about anyone can understand the appeal of (well, not the regulars in the gay bar, it seems), and a far cry from the hardened features of the woman on whom she is based. You can't help but imagine the discussion - "Goddamn it, we have to sell this - at least one of the lead characters has to be good looking!"

The first murder extends this fact/fiction approach. With no hard evidence as to exactly what took place save for the number of shots fired, the conversation and activity during all of the depicted killings are a matter of speculation, but for the encounter with the Richard Mallory stand-in, Jenkins has chosen to take Wuornos's account at her word (though substitutes aggressive invasion by a foreign object for rape, something that actually comes across visually as nastier), and presents Wuornos very much as the victim and her attacker's death as a cathartic necessity. But the film also uses this incident to both complicate and propel forward the still undeveloped relationship between Wuornos and Selby - in truth, Wuornos and Moore had together for three years before this incident occurred. This becomes the pattern for the rest of the film, with fact and fiction blended for dramatic effect, sometimes to the detriment of the story being told, as the truth, though more complicated and with fewer straightforward answers, is often more interesting than the over-familiar relationship clichés sometimes presented here.

Though his earlier rape conviction suggested that Wuornos's account of Mallory's supposed assault may indeed be true, the other six killings have remained a subject for some wild theorising, from the Freudian (she was killing her father over and over again), to the stupidly sensationalist (she was simply a lesbian man hater), to Wuornos's own account that she was acting in self defence and her later claim that it was all a matter of robbery and eliminating witnesses. Monster seems keen to flirt with several theories, and after the self defence of the first incident turns her into an avenging angel of the Christian moral right (oxymoron time again), killing a punter after he requests she call him daddy while they do the deed and prompting her to spit "fucking child molester!" after she has shot him, trading on what has of late become a tiresomely lazy way of labeling someone as deserving all they get. All of the early encounters present Wuornos as the innocent and her punters as sleazy, abusive scumbags. Here Aileen is a female Travis Bickle, a real rain that has come to wash the scum off the streets. A particularly fanciful sequence in which she tries for a secretarial job and is soundly humiliated by another pompously judgemental male ensures that we know she tried everything in her power to avoid all of this, and the seedy cop who drives her to a garage and demands a blow-job establishes the police as an organisation that will offer no help to someone like her. To hammer the point home, Wuornos is subjected to further humiliation by the cop, and we are informed that when he arrested Wuornos on a previous occasion he almost broke her skull. In this world, all men really are scum.

As money becomes tight and Selby pressures Aileen to return to prostitution, the main motivation switches to robbery, tinged with a dose of man-hating, the moralistic undertone still ever present (before killing a man who turns out to be an ex-cop, Wuornos sneers at his unfaithful attitude to his wife, then tells him how much she loathes men). This is emphasised by the pick-up she lectures about his desire to play it rough as a prelude to killing him, only to have him whimper that he's not like that and has never done this before. He escapes with his life and a quick hand-job, which Wuornos administers with a look of barely controlled revulsion. The final killing, in which a man who was simply offering to help Wuornos pleads for his life, only to be shot to cries of "I'm sorry!" suggests that Wuornos has unwittingly crossed a line. Dramatically, of course, that's the time for the police to wake up and catch her - she's now killed someone the film has actually marked as innocent. This reflects a rather tabloid view of the whole process, reviving memories of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, who did not become a subject of outrage in the British press until he killed his first non-prostitute.

As events come to a head and the police begin to close in, the film is back on more solidly factual, if dramatically shaky ground, Wuornos's eventual arrest being filmed in the actual biker bar in which it occurred, though this cuts little ice considering the games played with the truth elsewhere. The decision not to even mention the short but non-violent relationship Wuornos had with Dick Mills after Tyria had left her may have been made for dramatic flow, but it also serves to re-enforce the presentation of Aileen as a woman who, with the exception of Bruce Dern's easy-going old (and non-sexual) sage, only ever received abuse from the men she encountered, never kindness or even tolerance. If truth and legend collide, print the legend.

The final courtroom scenes are dealt with in ultra-brief style, but even then we are carefully steered to see Aileen as a tragic anti-hero. Her defiant, angry response to her verdict - "May you rot in hell! Sending a raped woman to death!" - is close to the what happened, but carefully avoiding her furiously hateful "I hope your wife and kids get raped - right in the ass!" avoids any willful nastiness on Aileen's part and the film gets to keep her as a victim, having been betrayed by the woman she loved and sentenced to death by an uncaring (male) judge who is uninterested in her claims that she was trying to protect herself. All of which is true, from a certain perspective, but a look at the documentary footage of this event shows just how sanitised and unambiguous the film has become by then.

Though ultimately even a film based on fact must stand and fall by its effectiveness as a drama, it is its very relation to the real Wuornos case, and the news footage, interview material and documentaries surrounding it, that serves to illustrate both the film's strengths and its weaknesses. Central to this is Charlize Theron's performance as Wuornos. A traditional Hollywood beauty, she has transformed herself here both facially and physically (teaming her with the diminutive Ricci emphasises her height, another male characteristic) and has clearly studied footage of Wuornos in full vitriolic flow. As an impersonation it is sometimes uncanny, but despite the widespread acclaim and the Academy Award, there is a nagging sense that the entire performance was based almost solely on footage of Wuornos after she had spent twelve years on death row, when the years in isolation had turned the calm, communicative and lucid talker of Nick Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer in 1992 into a sometimes wild-eyed woman on the edge of insanity whose mood could change in a second. Theron plays her this way for most of the film, volatile, extremely unstable and almost always a couple of twitchy steps away from violence. It's a showy and at times fascinating portrayal, but is also disappointingly restrictive. Thus comparisons with the documentary footage of the real-life Wuornos serve to highlight both the eye-catching accuracy of aspects of Theron's performance, and the fact that the Wuornos herself actually had a greater range, so to speak.

There is an unfussy efficiency to much of the film that serves the storytelling well, but this is repeatedly undermined by moments of quite horrible Hollywood clunkiness, almost always surrounding the relationship between Aileen and Selby. Music is the biggest offender here, and often it is either poorly used, or just plain annoying. This first makes itself known in the rather twee musical accompaniment to Aileen and Selby's first, largely innocence night together, but really makes its mark at a skating rink as the pair venture out together and finally kiss, and a horribly cheesy pop song is cranked up in an explosion of Hollywood romantic mawkishness. The scene is clearly designed to show Wuornos as a woman of love, passion and commitment, but it's so clumsily handled that I, for one, was having trouble keeping my lunch down. Later, as Aileen emerges from the bathroom ready to really commit to their relationship, another ghastly pop singer warbles loudly, "I don't really know her....but I think I could love her...." and on Aileen's proclamation of love to Selby, the warbler pipes up with "What a beautiful feeling..." followed by some nightmarish guitar twanging that had me reaching for the volume control. Though things never get this bad again, this state-the-bleedin'-obvious use of music pops up several times more, notably when Wuornos is cutting out newspaper clippings of her crimes (very serial killer!) as her relationship with Selby is straining, and the radio is blurting out: "I'm gonna keep on lovin' you.....'cause it's the only thing I wanna do..." There is also a tendency to build to key events - one of the shootings, the verdict at her trial - with an onslaught of electronic guitar twanging that rises to a crescendo and seems to shout "THIS IS A BIG MOMENT!" at you in an extraordinarily unsubtle way.

As we get nearer to the end the film slips more and more into familiar troubled relationship territory, and Wuornos's tearful emotional collapse at the bus station comes across as an uncomfortable mix of tragedy, guilt and over-the-top histrionics. By then this complicated true-life story has been reduced to the level of B-movie melodrama, which has promoted more than one reviewer to note the similarity of this film's style and approach to that of the exploitation features of Roger Corman. Viewed on that level, Monster certainly has a lot going for it, as it never flags, creates an effective anti-hero (in part by making almost everyone else seem worse) and is energetically performed. But there is a sense that with a little less reliance on twee romanticism, storytelling cliché, over-simplification and drama-inspired fact-bending, this could have been much more powerful and affecting work.

Sound and Vision