Murderous states

FILMS

Two movies offer radically opposed views on killing those who kill

BRIAN D. JOHNSON

Hollywood has always loved the death penalty. More often than not, a thriller ends with the bad guy getting it, one way or the other. Killed, then killed again for good measure. Gunned down. Blown up. Fried. Drowned. Dropped off a ledge. Squashed like a bug. Terminated, with extreme prejudice. And the cold fact of the villain’s death seems less important than the spirit of satisfaction that accompanies it.

From the lynch-mob hangings of the Old West to the lethal-injection chambers of the Deep South, the right to savor vengeance, like the right to bear arms, has come to occupy a cherished place on the dark side of American democracy. And with executions on the rise in the United States—there were 56 last year, up from 31 in 1994—capital punishment is enjoying a renaissance.

This month, two new movies address the issue of violent retribution, but from diametrically opposed viewpoints. In Eye for an Eye, a mother who sees her daughter’s killer go free on a legal technicality takes the law into her own hands and plots his murder. It is a crude formula thriller, paying lip service to the moral dilemma of vigilante violence only to fudge it in the end. Dead Man Walking, on the other hand, is a breathtaking tragedy, the profoundly moving story of a man on

death row who spends the last week of his life trying to locate his soul with the help of a Roman Catholic nun. Bruce Springsteen, who wrote the title song for the Dead Man Walking sound track, offered a deft capsule review when he introduced the ballad to an audience at Toronto’s Massey Hall last week. “There’s a picture out right now,” he said, “that takes on the issue of capital punishment in a very nonrhetorical way.” Precisely. Dead Man Walking never proselytizes. Weighing the grief of the victims’ families against empathy for the condemned man, it goes out of its way to be evenhanded. But in purely emotional terms, it adds up to what may be the most compelling argument against the death penalty ever committed to film.

There have been others, of course, from The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a western in which three innocent ranchers are hanged, to 1991’s Let Him Have It, the true story of a British man who was sent to the gallows for a crime he did not commit. But, almost invariably, movies that take a position against capital punishment involve men wrongly convicted on circumstantial evidence. What makes Dead Man Walking so effective is that the man facing execution is not innocent. He is not even sympathetic. And that allows the moral issue—of whether the state should be in the business of killing

anyone in cold blood—to stand on its own.

Writer-director Tim Robbins based his script for Dead Man Walking on the 1993 best-seller by Sister Helen Prejean. The book is a rivetting chronicle of Prejean’s experience serving as a spiritual advisor to two death row inmates in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison—first Patrick Sonnier, who was executed in 1982 for the lovers-lane killing of a teenage couple; then Robert Lee Willie, executed in 1984 for the murder of an 18year-old girl. There are striking parallels between the two cases. Both involve accomplices who may have done the actual killing but get away with jail terms. The condemned man in the movie is a fictional composite, a shiftless inmate named Matthew, who is brilliantly played by Sean Penn. His crime is patterned after Sonnier’s—a brutal and crazed assault on two teenagers in the woods at night.

Susan Sarandon, who brought the book to the attention of Robbins, her live-in companion, portrays Prejean.

For an actress who has built her career on playing saucy, uninhibited women, she makes a surprisingly credible nun. Downplaying her glamor,

Sarandon displays the same resilience that made her so effective as the crusading mother in Lorenzo’s Oil. But Prejean is a less confident character. She is a kind of middle-aged naïf whose faith in the simplicity of virtue is suddenly shaken.

Prejean enters Matthew’s life at the 11th hour with no idea of what she is getting into. The son of an impoverished share-cropper, he is a selfish, snickering racist who shows no signs of remorse.

Penn plays him with a quiet, feral intensity. At first, there is an erotic subtext to their encounters through the prison glass, something that is absent from the book. But with a woman as attractive as Sarandon offering solace on death row, a touch of sexual tension seems only natural. Thankfully, it is not taken too far. liiere is no romance, and nothing like the cage-rattling sadism of The Silence of the Lambs.

Instead, the relationship is spiritual. As Matthew’s bravado eventually cracks, he opens up to Prejean, revealing the terrified child within. Meanwhile, she campaigns to stop the execution, and at the same time earnestly seeks out the families of the murder victims to offer solace. Dispensing Christian love on both sides of the capitalpunishment issue, she learns, is not easy. She finds herself at odds with church leaders, prison officials and her community.

The drama has Christian overtones, but they are restrained. Prejean, who does not wear a habit, is a reformist nun. With an ex-

otic sound track featuring Johnny Cash, Ry Cooder—and more sitars than pipe organs, Robbins keeps the mood secular. And although the crucifixion can be seen as Western history’s primal instance of capital punishment, Matthew is not inflated into a Christ figure.

The dramatic power of Dead Man Walking resides in the inexorable countdown to Matthew’s death. Intercutting the sequence with flashbacks to the crime scene, the filmmakers establish the link between murder and execution as two sides of the same coin. The camera observes the ritual of lethal injection in painstaking detail, tracking the insidious progress of liquids through tubes, until the point becomes clear: no killing is more premeditated and cold-blooded than execution. And as the condemned man’s soul delivers his last words, Penn’s perfor-

mance reaches a devastating catharsis: “I just want to say I think killing is wrong, no matter who does it—me, or y’all, or your government.”

Dead Man Walking is one in a series of recent movies that question the virtue of violent retribution. In Seven, blind vengeance turns out to be the tragic trump card among the seven deadly sins, the folly that triggers the downfall of the detective played by Brad Pitt. The bloody mayhem of Pulp Fiction culminates with the Bible-quoting avenger played by Samuel L. Jackson declaring an amnesty. And The Crossing Guard, which Penn wrote and directed, portrays revenge as a perverse form of denial. It stars Jack Nicholson as a father obsessed with murdering the

drunk driver who killed his daughter. The killer, who has served his time, is sensitive, penitent and wracked by guilt; Nicholson’s character, who has never properly mourned his daughter’s death, is poisoned with rage. In the end, drenched in tears and embracing over the girl’s grave, they find common ground in compassion.

Eye for an Eye takes a similar premise in the opposite direction, by treating vengeance as therapy. Karen (Sally Field) is stuck in traffic, talking to her teenage daughter on a cell phone, when the girl is suddenly raped and murdered by a psychotic intruder (Kiefer Sutherland). Although DNA tests prove the killer’s identity, prosecution bungling allows him to go free. (In case anyone misses the point, a clip of the O. J. trial flashes across a TV screen early in the story.) Karen begins stalking the killer. And, through a support group for victims of violence, she hooks up with some men who offer to arm and train her to kill him.

Field’s righteous heroine expresses moral qualms about her mission. But the film opens the debate only to shut it down with appalling hypocrisy. The killer is irredeemably evil, therefore expendable. Karen finds a sneaky way to blow him away that leaves her conscience clear—on a lt; technicality. And she takes I action only after he rapes and kills a second woman in a face-smashing scene that director John Schlesinger directs with gratuitous violence.

If Eye for an Eye were just another dumb thriller about killing a bad guy, it would not be so irritating. But by raising the moral issue, it is more like a dumb TV movie proposing a vigilantelite brand of violent retribution.

In her book, Dead z Man Walking, Prejean % quotes a Louisiana I corrections official o named Paul Phelps | saying, “People these days want revenge, and that’s what revenge is—‘an eye for an eye, pain for pain, torture for torture.’ ” It is a strange form of justice, one that tries to play to an audience—a market. And in that sense, the system that sends men to death is not so different from the one that tries to keep them entertained. □