WRECKING BALL

Screenplay by Yancy Drapkin

Prestige material resonates on a character level of American Beauty, Good Will Hunting, and Ordinary People. Moving script about a widow named Mavis who loses her husband in a senseless lawnmower accident and trashes her corporate law career, destroys her relationships with toxic friends, and finally, symbolizing her state of mind, bulldozes her house in suburbia with the help of an eager Mexican wrecking crew. Monsters Ball was like this script, ferociously well-drawn, exploring grief and shattered lives through a completely character-driven love story with flashes of unbearable drama. When Mavis meets a pot-smoking widower struggling to raise a son who’s a bully, she schools the boy on how to make a chocolate mousse and shows the widower how to be a better father. Turns out our one woman wrecking ball kept her terminal cancer diagnosis hidden from everybody and her late husband never told Mavis about his second family outside their marriage. Life is tough, life is weird, life is short, script seems to say, so figure it out before your number is up.