Dead Man Walking (1996) * * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
There really is a Sister Helen Prejean, and she really did befriend not just one but several Death Row inmates, serving as their spiritual advisors before they were gassed or electrocuted. The book "Dead Man Walking", from which this astonishing movie is drawn, goes into far deeper detail about the politics and inherent ugliness of Death Row, but the movie preserves the deepest spirit of the book: to bear witness to and to bring humanity to a troubling subject.
And what a film this is. This is not a simple-minded piece of propaganda -- although the film is avowedly against the death penalty, it does not bore us with speechifying. It simply presents the case of two people -- one, a nun who works in inner-city neighborhoods (Prejean, played radiantly by Susan Sarandon), and the other, a death-row inmate named Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) who unrepentantly aided in the murder of a lovers'-lane couple. (Poncelet is a fictionalized combination of several characters, but this does not distract from the storytelling in any way.)
As the movie opens, Poncelet writes to Prejean and asks here to visit. Nothing more than that. Prejean takes this in the spirit in which it was offered, and goes to see this fellow without pretense. With his hair Brylcreemed back in an Elvis pompidour and his wiry facial hair, Poncelet looks like he's some odd mixture of gigolo and back-alley dweller. But he's clearly scared and nervous, and he admits to Prejean that he is frightened of dying, and wants to do whatever he can to avoid the chair. Prejean agrees to help him file his appeals, and draws quiet little parallels between them that get under Poncelet's skin.
What follows from this is by turns brutally sad and achingly beautiful. Poncelet has spent his whole life squirming on the hook, avoiding responsibility, and one of the things Prejean does is help catalyze the latent guilt inside of him. Not by lecturing him, although she does do that every so often, but simply by confronting him with his own humanity, and hers. At one point Poncelet makes something like a pass at her (she's moderately attractive, and he is a prisoner, afer all), and she simply looks at him and murmurs: "Here you are with death breathing on your neck and you're playing your little man- on-the-make games." He seems ashamed, like a schoolboy who has been caught sneaking a puff in the boy's room (even the way he smokes is guilt-ridden, come to think of it). Then again, in many ways, he *is* a boy, and a good deal of his stance comes from trying to "take things like a man" -- all macho bluff, without any of the real humility and sensitivity that maturity requires.
The film also toys with the possibility that Poncelet is not entirely guilty, that he was ramrodded through the system as a scapegoat while a confederate in the crime (who may have done the actual trigger-pulling) was given a life sentence. But by the time we learn the truth about this, it's irrelevant. The question is not Poncelet's guilt in the eyes of the law, but his sense of dignity. Murderer or no, Prejean argues, he is human, and what we are doing in this cold and calculated way is every bit as hateful and vile as what he did in his drunkenness and shallow stupidity.
Prejean's attitude about Poncelet is put all the more brutally to the test when she goes to the parents of the victims and haltingly tries to help them as well. At first they angrily spurn her offerings. One couple horribly misinterprets her help as a sign that she's "changed sides" (although in Prejean's mind, the only "sides" are life and death). But one of the fathers lets her into his heart, and realizes that it hurts worse to suffer alone no matter what.
The final half-hour of the film has the midnight execution deadline looming, and brings Poncelet back into contact with his family. His mother appears briefly at a parole board hearing earlier in the movie, a thin and pathetic figure, and breaks down sobbing before she can even speak of her son at all. Poncelet's brothers sit with him in the visiting room and act like they're unruly schoolboys at detention, while their mother sighs and shakes her head, and we get a hint of what was lacking all along.
And then there is death itself. This is not one of those movies where there is some fancy courtroom theatrics that brings down a last-minute reprieve. Poncelet and Prejean stare down death in the face together, and in the end there is redemption, but not in the form of Poncelet praising Christ, either: there's real redemption, with the victim's families standing there behind a glass partition while Poncelet bares his soul.
Penn and Sarandon disappear completely into their characters; there isn't a moment I was less than convinced of their performances. The supporting cast (with R. Lee Ermey as one of the fathers and Robert Prosky as a death-row lawyer) is also excellent, and the director is none other than Sarandon's longtime companion Tim Robbins. This film shows him to be gifted and perceptive in ways that most Hollywood films are incapable of being, because they are handicapped by the sense that you *need* to have the 11th-hour reversal of fortune, etc. Here, Robbins simply wades into the story, and does amazing justice to it.
When people are interested in finding movies that are uplifting or "spiritual", this is one of the first films I mention. I hope they see what I mean.
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