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Lethal inspection

FILM
PHILIP FRENCH

LETHAL
INSPECTION

Dead Man Walking stands out among this week’s releases

1    As a social issue and a    electric chair, the gas chamber)    punishment, the important thing
 source of exciting drama, on offer in the 37 other about this patient, unsensational,
 capital punishment has American states that still practise richly detailed film is that it
 been on the cinematic agenda for capital punishment. The film’s speaks quietly to and for both
 80 years. It was firmly placed resonant title is what the chief sides of the question, preaching
 there when D.W. Griffith chose a guard shouts as he leads a neither to the converted nor the
 wrongfully condemned man condemned man down the unconverted. Rightly, capital
 awaiting the gallows as the hero corridor to the place of execution. punishment is put in its present
 of the modern strand of4    Based on a true story, American context - a conser-
 Intolerance, his epic study of Dead Man Walking centres on vative US Supreme Court has
 injustice through the ages. the relationship between handed the issue over to the
 Following Griffith’s example, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan local politicians to be used as a
 most subsequent pictures have Sarandon), a nun from a well-off football; death row is exclusively
 dealt with miscarriages of justice New Orleans Catholic family, populated by the inadequately
 both real and fictional, and with and Matthew Poncelet (Sean defended poor, most of them
 sad victims of society. Penn), a confused, preening black; and a lottery-like system
2    No one nowadays believes working-class criminal who’s determines who will end up
 that Timothy Evans was guilty or been on death row for five years there.
 that Ruth Ellis deserved to hang. and asks her to be his spiritual6    The film never loses sight of
 Yet to avoid special pleading and adviser in the final week before the devastating effects of an
 to confront supporters of capital his execution. Sarandon with her appalling crime on the victims’
 punishment at their strongest large expressive brown eyes and families. Some of the best scenes
 point, total abolitionists must Penn with his large, expressive are between Helen and the
 address themselves to cases blue eyes face each other murdered girl’s bereft parents
 where the crime is unspeakably through the bars that separate (R. Lee Ermey, Celia Weston)
 brutal, the guilt proven beyond visitor from prisoner and across and the murdered boy’s
 doubt and the convicted person the moral and social chasm that distraught father (Raymond J.
 does not invite our easy lies between them. Their Barry), whose wife, anxious to
 sympathy. Such a case was astonishing performances chart start a new life, has left him.
 invented by Krzysztof Kieslowski the uneasy growth of a complex Even the conventional prison
 in A Short Film About Killing bond as Helen first tries to chaplain, who takes a dim view
 (1988), a film so graphic in its secure a reprieve for him, then of Sister Helen’s refusal to wear
 depiction of judicial hanging that prepares him to accept his guilt her habit, is treated sympa-
 within weeks of its opening there and die with dignity. As she says, thetically, though one assumes it
 was a moratorium on capital what truly links them is their was not by chance that he is
 punishment in Poland. common humanity as children of played by Scott Wilson, still best
3    In his equally devastating God. known for his role as Dick
 Dead Man Walking, the writer-  Hickock, one of the young
 director Tim Robbins has gone  murderers sent to the gallows in
 even further than Kieslowski. The film never loses the film version of Truman
 Not only is the crime (the rape sight of the Capote’s In Cold Blood.
 and double murder of two New devastating effects Ultimately, Dead Man Walking is
 Orleans teenagers) even worse, of an appalling concerned with issues that lie
 and the killer an articulate neo- crime on the behind the debate on capital
 Nazi redneck, but the form of victims’ families punishment: it’s about society,
 execution awaiting him in the  personal responsibility and what
 Louisiana state penitentiary  St Paul meant when he wrote
 (lethal injection) is more humane5    While one knows where that ‘we are members one of
 than the various alternatives Helen Prejean and Tim Robbins another’.
 (hanging, firing squad, the stand on the issue of capital 
   ‘The Observer Review’,
   March 31, 1996