The meaning of death, page 2
By contrast, "Dead Man Walking," Tim Robbins' remarkable film about convicted murderer Matthew Poncelet and the nun who comes into his life as it nears its state-sanctioned end, possesses that rarest of qualities: moral humility. Robbins, like Sister Helen Prejean, on whose autobiographical book the film is based, clearly opposes the death penalty, but there is a curious, and moving, agnostic quality to his opposition. There are no grand, Clarence Darrow-like perorations about how the state has no right to play God. Ideology, intellectual abstractions, arguments for or against the death penalty, matter less here than a profoundly communicated sense of something ordinary, indefinable, and of inestimable value -- life itself, even though it is the life of a miserable, hate-filled man who has destroyed two families.The images that linger in the mind are ephemeral, banal: Poncelet's little brother pacing back and forth in the visiting room at the family's last visit, making his shoes squeak as bored young children do, as his mother and his brothers sit in a now-what-do-we-say silence that speaks of great and ordinary love. The tough mask of Poncelet's face, in perhaps
the most revelatory moment of a performance of great pathos by Sean Penn, cracking just for an instant as his mother breaks down. Sister Prejean, lying dazed on a bed, saying in confusion, "Oh, it's so bizarre, a man's going to be killed tomorrow in front of me." It is her confusion, not her conviction, that touches the heart, just as it is Robbins' moral uncertainty that gives his film its moral credibility.
Throughout, Robbins refuses to load the dice. He refuses to portray the grieving, bitter parents of the victims as caricatures: their desire for revenge, or closure, is never cheapened. He scrupulously balances the scene in which Poncelet is executed with horrifying flashbacks to the murder: we are never allowed to forget what Poncelet did. Film, with its unrivalled capacity to keep the past ghoulishly alive, is a superb instrument for moral exploration: like Krzysztof Kieslowski's "A Short Film About Killing," which portrays a murder and an execution with the same cold-blooded detachment, "Dead Man Walking" is a kind of ethical laboratory. Those who oppose capital punishment are forced to watch the crimes, while those who support it are forced to look into the killer's soul.
Indeed, more than anything else, this is a film about watching. Its central image is the open, courageous, pained face of Sister Prejean (played wonderfully by Susan Sarandon), whose vocation has placed her outside the world -- and given her the moral courage to face it unflinchingly.
"I think killing's wrong, whether I do it or the state does it," Poncelet says as, the fatal IV in his arm, he is tilted upright on a gurney so that he may speak his last words to the observers. In one sense, this is clearly the film's moral; but it is not its only, or perhaps even its ultimate, one. For in the end, this is a story about redemption -- a secularized version of Christ's passion. In its piercing spiritual simplicity, "Dead Man Walking" recalls Dickens, the great artist of spiritual regeneration (who would probably be regarded by some of today's self-assured moralists as the original bleeding heart).
Yet Robbins avoids playing the sentimental card. The issue of whether or not the state has the right to kill Poncelet remains separate from the issue of his salvation: it is left to the viewer to decide whether the two things should be connected. And this reticence speaks most powerfully of all. In this realm, those who are certain they have the answer are revealed to be those who are lost in darkness.
Do you think "Dead Man Walking" makes a case against the death penalty? Go to Table Talk and click on the Movies category.
