The hubbub surrounding Monster's Ball is closely tied to Halle Barry's win as the first black Best Actress in Academy Award history. Before singing hosannas to her courageous performance, however, itself an opportunity earned because Vanessa Williams and Angela Bassett both reportedly passed on the role of Leticia Musgrove, Marc Forster's picture isn't really about her at all. Instead it's about Hank Grotowski and his middle age crisis as richly portrayed by Billy Bob Thornton.

Yet the film's impact shouldn't be minimized as "mere" domestic melodrama since it's a fabulous, though frequently uncomfortable, movie-going experience. Notable for non-mainstream filmmakers, as well, Monster's Ball has been incredibly profitable based on its $4 million budget and $30 million in domestic box office, even before cable or home video rights. Then there's the participation of hip hop stars Mos Def and Sean Combs in supporting roles, although the point of Forster's movie is to force extremely faulty, ordinary people into circumstance of incredible desperation to see what happens.

Set up as the force of law, Hank is lead correctional officer of a prison. He lords over his inmates and peers alike, among them his son Sonny (Heath Ledger), a neophyte guard. Among their collective responsibilities is round-the-clock of care of death row where Lawrence Musgrove (Combs) awaits his execution.

In the Grotwoski clan, tensions run thick, shadowing a dim tether of similarity. Caught within a web of racist attitudes, both, Hank and Sonny are poisoned by heritage. Seemingly begun with Buck Grotowski (played deeply against Everybody Loves Raymond-type by Peter Boyle), Hank's retired and ailing father, the old man projects the kind of anti-black vitriol often associated with the dirtiest of dirty jokes.

Into this circumstance unravels the Musgrove clan as Leticia struggles to mother her son, Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun), while awaiting her husband's execution.

SPOILER ALERT: Once he's put to death, the precarious balance of the Grotowski household resulting in Sonny's suicide and Hank's turning away from the kind of manhood espoused by Buck.

Simultaneously, and in an unlikely twist, Tyrell is killed by a hit and run driver for which Hank plays reluctant friend to Leticia in helping her get to the hospital. Sharing, at first, little more than dead children, the two begin a romance punctuated by turns of lovemaking and remarkably deepening emotions. Remarkable not simply for being unexpected, but remarkable because choice and goodness rule the day.

In the end Leticia learns of Hank's pivotal role in her husband's death. She also realizes his new loyalty to her in his efforts to remove all offences from his life by welcoming her into the vacant space of hope he's slowly built in her honor.

Beyond star power and an extremely explicit sex scene, Monster's Ball succeeds because it plays out a circumstance of extremely unlikely coincidences to enliven people often reduced to caricature in the mass media. That is, cracker-white-boy-racists and no-account-single-black-mothers are always more than two-dimensional ciphers in a broad social continuum. They are also flesh and blood people with ambitions, dreams and room for improvement within the expression of mutual honesty and trust.

Not a bad message for 2001's little sleeper of a movie that could. Nor is it a dismissal of the result despite a few odd pieces of plotting and dialogue.

In the end, though, Monster's Ball isn't for every viewer, what with its racially suggestive profanity, nudity, explicit sexual content and sense of pending violence just off screen. Still, for those willing to engage Forster's film, the rewards number in lasting memories of its surprising turns that coat it with enough dramatic grease to go down easy.