Movie: Dead Man Walking (Tin Robbins, 1995)
Sister Helean Prejean (Susan Sarandon) has received a letter from Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) an inmate asking for legal sipport. After years on death row, Matthew is to be executed in a week for killing two teenagers. He maintains that he didn't pull the trigger, but archive footage from the trial paints a different picture, and his current behavior doesn't point to a remorseful innocent either. When his appeal is rejected, Sister Helen is assigned to be his spiritual adviser for his final days, a job she is not exactly cut out for. The film directly connects her faith to her opposition to the death penalty and her belief that even the worst people deserve dignlty, but it also connects her vocation to her naivety. Her conversations with the grieving families are an early example of the film's thorny greatness. Robbins lets Sarandon mostly listen as the parents dig out their deepest feelings to discuss their kids' final days, their love for them and the hurt the killings have caused them. It becomes impossible to blame them for desiring Matthew death, a desire that may well have been strengthened by Helen own actions and sensibilites. She has never known romantic love or thought much about the feelings associated with its causes and consequences. At times, it seems as if she finds it easier to sympathise with Matthew's fear of death than with the victims' families' anger about their children being taken away from them. Susan Sarandon won an Oscar for her role and is really great. The film is as much a righteous condemnation of the death penalty as it is a portrayal of a nun's self-discovery of what it means in practice to act according to her beliefs.
I also enjoyed Robert Prosky, portraying Matthew's lawyer as a Southern raconteur whose jovial demeanor softens his (and the film's) moral indignation. He is the most obvious mouthpiece for Robbins' opposition to the death penalty, but his argumentative asides always play more like eccentric character touches. Still, it can't be denied that the film does ocassaionally veer into the kind of didacticism you can expect from a politically minded actor-turned-director, but any such objections will be long forgotten once we reach Matthew's final day, and especially his confession to Helen that he did murder one of the teens and raped the other, finally heeding her lessons that redemption (whatever form that may take) is only possible if he confesses and takes responsibility for the truth and his sins. Sean Penn is good here, but the scene belongs to Sarandon, portraying the Sister's religious trance as her own version of experiencing sexual/romantic pleasure. Robbins' stylistic choices follow suit and the scene is essentially played as an exuberantly triumphant moment that has finally earned Matthew love and dignity.
What follows is an even more provocative sequence, crosscutting between the execution process and the murders commited by Matthew many years before. At one point the film cuts right from Sarandon's redshot eyes watching Penn get injected to the fearful eyes of his victim awaiting the fatal gun shot. It's a chilling match cut that utlimately goes beyond placing the state on the same level as cold-blooded killers. The latter at least have no delusions about what they are doing, their inhumane conduct and unconcealed, vicious cruelty entirely fits their actions. The state on the other hand creates a sanitised ceremony where correct perfectly scheduled formalities (the final goodbyes with the family, the final dinner, the final words, the guard screaming out "Dead man walking", the careful, orderly preparation of the tools used for exectuon) whitewash what's going on, while extending the agony of the person about to be murdered. You may question whether spiritual redemption is enough to turn a racist rapist into a profile in courage; death row will do the job anyway.
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