Grade: A-

Verdict: A compelling and superbly acted character study.

Details: Starring Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry and Sean Combs. Directed by Marc Forster. Rated R for violence and sex.

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Review: "Monster's Ball" gives us a different kind of executioner's song - one less about lives lost than lives saved.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Hank Grotowski, a Georgia corrections officer assigned to death row. Halle Berry is the widow of a man he's just executed. The hope and absolution they find in each other is the focus of this spare, impeccably acted drama. It's also about how a good thing can come along when it's least expected. And how that good thing may not even know it's a good thing.

Being a death-row guard is kind of a family business for the Grotowskis (as in Jerzy, the famed Polish theater director?). Hank's father, Buck (Peter Boyle), a billious and decrepit racist, worked death row. So does Hank's son, Sonny (Heath Ledger showing acting chops you'd never expect from "A Knight's Tale" or "The Patriot").

Hank may vomit in the morning on the day of an execution, but he's a professional who respects the dignity of the condemned. That respect is illustrated in great detail in the movie's first half hour - a drawn-out execution that makes "Dead Man Walking" look like a stroll in the park.

The condemned man is Lawrence Musgrove (Sean Combs, showing some acting chops, too), a murderer who's spent eleven years on death row. When his wife, Leticia (Berry), and their melancholy, obese son Tyrell (Coronji Calhoun) make their final visit, her hooded eyes and nervous, defeated body language suggest Lawrence's death may be a relief as much as anything else.

The movie takes its time showing us the curiously courteous ritual of killing a man. So when Sonny gets sick while escorting Lawrence to the electric chair, Hank goes ballistic. "You F*d up that man's last walk! How would you like it if someone F*d up your last walk!"

Along with the death row job, Hank has inherited his old man's rancid knee-jerk racism. (well, Hank's is actually kind of casual by comparison) When he and Leticia are thrown together by circumstances, you smell trouble ahead. Neither knows their strange bond, but each recognizes a too-familiar loneliness in the other.

Milo Addica and Will Rokos' quiet, perceptive script takes its time - reeaaallly takes its time - but it's time well spent. Though the film runs through a number of social issues - racism, the death penalty, interracial relationships - it's really more of a character study. The writers want us to understand how Hank could be spouting racial slurs one moment, then helping a stranded Letitcia in a downpour the next. They want us to see how Letitia's backed-into-a-corner despair surfaces in the way she mercilessly abuses Tyrell. Never has kid sneaking a candy bar seem so sad.

Swiss director Marc Forster, whose films "Loungers" and "Everything Put Together" never played Atlanta commercially, knows exactly what the writers are getting at. He gets their tone, their nuances. When Leticia drops by to see Hank and instead finds Buck, you want to yell,"Danger, Will Robinson!"

Hank's overly ritualized life - he eats chocolate ice cream with a plastic spoon every day at the same booth in the same diner - is a creative way to show how he copes with his job - which is all about ritual - and with his life - which is in free fall. By contrast, Leticia's life is anything but ritualized. And it's in that endless tumble of fear and emptiness that they first connect, which Forster demonstrates by showing us their reticence and their raw neediness.

There's been a lot of Oscar buzz surrounding the two stars. Deservedly so. Berry returns to the ferociousness she displayed a decade ago, playing a drug addict in Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever." She's done so many decorative roles since then we've almost forgotten that she's capable of playing more than The Girl.

Thorton continues his amazing streak that's included his addled thief in "Bandits" and his withdrawn barber in "The Man Who Wasn't There." His Hank is a man at risk. Someone who knows he must either change or, well, become the man who isn't there.

The title, by the way, refers to a party thrown by 19th century London jailers on the night before an execution. Yes, it's an unusual title, but then, this is an unusual movie. As oddly comforting as it is unsettling, "Monster's Ball" honors novelist E.M. Forster's famed dictum: "Only Connect."

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution