Monster's Ball (15); <br></br> Roberto Succo (15)

America: the art of the overkill

Regular readers of this column may have twigged to a certain bias of mine: I'm inclined to trust American films a lot less than films from other parts of the world. I wouldn't call it a prejudice: I'm always ready and hoping for the right American film to sweep me away with its persuasiveness. But American films – whether from Hollywood or from that quasi-Hollywood middle-ground that currently passes for an independent scene – have largely forgotten how to persuade or seduce. They tend to make their point with excess rhetoric, and worst of all, perhaps, are the ones that take themselves seriously: they beat you over the head with their would-be subtlety, which is usually nothing more than solemnity. What regularly distinguishes the best cinema from elsewhere – from Europe, say – is a certain reserve, an implicit understanding that audiences know enough to divine a film's meaning for themselves, without being spoon-fed on atmospherics or explanation.

Two new releases illustrate the contrast. The week's art-house cause célèbre is Monster's Ball, the film that won Halle Berry her Academy Award as Best Actress – unbelievably, the first ever given to a black actress. Apart from its historic significance, this film by the Swiss-born Marc Forster has impeccable liberal concerns: racism, the death penalty, male violence, the struggles of black working women. The film is rooted in a real world, but it feels like a bizarre melodramatic fantasy. Hank Grotowski (Billy Bob Thornton), an officer in a Death Row prison, has inherited his deep-seated racism from his father Buck (Peter Boyle), yet failed to pass it on to his son Sonny (Heath Ledger). Despised by his father and grandfather for softness, Sonny, who has followed in the family business, throws up while leading a prisoner to the chair. That prisoner is the artistically-inclined Laurence Musgrove, played by Sean Combs, aka rap mogul P.Diddy, bucking his image with a muted and sensitive cameo.

After Hank and Musgrove's wife Leticia (Halle Berry) suffer respective traumatic losses, they are drawn together in a passionate romance that helps Leticia survive her pain and redeems Hank. Thus an angry authoritarian racist becomes a tender, loving soul who rejects his father's ways and those of the punitive prison system. It feels implausible, a heartfelt "if only" about breaking a historical chain of violence. The script, by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, is sometimes clumsy, with a distinctly old-fashioned ring ("It truly takes a human being to see a human being"), but the dialogue works best when it's terse and brutal (Hank, presiding over a burial: "All I wanna hear is that dirt hit that box").

Yet you can imagine how well the script might have worked given direction that played up the hothouse William Faulkner strangeness: here, after all, is a story in which tombstones mount up in a racist's backyard, and in which the climactic revelation depends on the discovery of a dead man's drawings. Instead, Forster piles on the atmospherics. A diner is huge, an Edward Hopper expanse of nocturnal neon; cars don't roll, but levitate in baleful slow motion; a wisp of cigarette smoke lingers in a just-vacated room. The strangest example of such art-overkill is the sex scene between Berry and Thornton, spuriously poeticised with artful framing and cutaways to the bars of a bird cage. To an oppressive degree, Forster misses no chance to make things signify.

In fact, the film's true asset is its single most understated factor: Billy Bob Thornton, almost as low-key as in The Man Who Wasn't There. His Hank persuades you that there's a well of need and fury beneath a catatonic exterior; he's a mumbling, iron-jawed zombie craving release from his own prison. Halle Berry's performance is less commanding, hitting a few too-familiar emotional notes. Her full-on tragic frenzy in a hospital scene is less impressive than her undeniably virtuoso moment of boozy trauma, swigging from a Jack Daniels miniature, waving elegant hands with hilarity shading into despair.

Even so, Berry's casting suggests a compromise with mainstream glamour, presumably with financing in mind: any pretence at harsh realism is undercut by her catwalk-fresh beauty (she's about as believable as a harassed, impoverished waitress as Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny). Nor can you quite believe her and the equally svelte Combs producing the obese child played by Coronji Calhoun (a leap of faith justified by stressing the boy's chocaholism). Like so much "thoughtful", supposedly independent-spirit US cinema, Monster's Ball is a pre-packaged, eminently saleable, altogether stolid product dressed up in ragged art-house chic.

Compare the cool-headed economy of Roberto Succo. Cédric Kahn's true-crime drama recounts the career of an Italian killer on the loose in Eighties France, and ostensibly at least, has no argument to sell us: it appears simply to say, this is how it was. The film is partly a clipped police-procedural narrative, recounting the investigation led by a straight-arrow cop, played with commanding anonymity by Patrick Dell'Isola. We barely get to know who this inspector is: above all, he embodies the film's own analytical, implacable approach.

The other strand, objective as it is, brings us surprisingly close to Roberto Succo's personality. He is a killer in love, squiring a doting and dazzled teenager Léa (the coltish, energetically natural Isild le Besco), for whose benefit he struts, sulks and generally acts wild and dangerous. The irony is that she fails to see how dangerous he really is, but then the film is brilliant on the inconsistencies of human reaction: just as Léa seems barely to register his confession that he killed his parents, so three other girls blithely leap into Succo's car even after seeing him go crazy at a disco. There's something entirely realistic about Kahn's detached "go figure" attitude to human mutability; compare Monster's Ball, where characters conveniently become whatever the script requires them to be at any given moment.

With his alarming eyes and hot-wired twitchiness, newcomer Stefano Cassetti makes a magnetic centre to the film, Kahn trusting his presence to tell the story without superfluous commentary: the first shot of him, in profile, staring down a couple at a disco, speaks volumes. Kahn barely uses music, just a few snatches of a Marianne Faithfull dirge, which is as near as he comes to overstatement. There's an acute sense of life's discontinuity, as the story skips from moment to moment, without filling in the gaps: like the cop, we collect stray jigsaw pieces of Succo's career. Roberto Succo could be read as a study of male violence, a critique of thriller conventions, an inquiry into European national identities. But that's for the viewer to decide, and Kahn trusts us to make our own meaning out of his material. With supreme confidence, Roberto Succo presents itself as nothing other than what it seems: a case history. That reserve makes it so much more.

j.romney@independent.co.uk