Redemption is a hard thing to pull off, either in life or on the screen, but in “Dead Man Walking” the very deep mystery of a relentless Love assumes a palpable heft that rolls right over audiences, even secular ones.
Most stories are journeys of one sort or another, but very few take us to the place “Dead Man Walking” travels. The waters there are deep and troubled, made so by the confluence of many “rivers” of tears, as one character puts it. Topically, the film takes viewers into the tangled debate on capital punishment.
To his great credit, director Tim Robbins’s screenplay avoids Hollywood’s accustomed sanctimony and deck-stacking in treating “serious” moral or political issues. Refusing to mince the horrors of either the crime or the punishment, Robbins eschews formulas, staying close to the heart and bone of those who do murder and those who suffer its aftermath. Here are no last-minute escapes, revelations, reprieves, or pardons, not for anybody: victims, families, activists, murderers, or viewers.
“Dead Man Walking” is mostly about people who by different routes find themselves amid life’s worst tragedies and deepest griefs, a place where cliches–cinematic, political, or religious–simply don’t work very well. In particular, the film centers on the search by a nun and a convict for a Christian redemption of the old-style guilt-contrition-forgiveness sort. For this soul-shaking excursion, we must thank Robbins’s tough-minded screenplay and direction, riveting performances by Academy Award-winner Susan Sarandon (Best Actress) and Sean Penn (who was nominated for an Academy Award), and perhaps most of all, the candor, compassion, and courage of a real-life nun, Sister Helen Prejean, on whose book the story is based.
The result is an arresting, utterly credible, and profoundly moving exploration of Christianity’s capacity to console the earth’s most forlorn creatures. Surely, the film’s wrestling with capital punishment is passionate, smart, and honest, but it also argues that there are perhaps more vital concerns than by whose hands or what means we die, matters that involve the inmost transactions of the soul.
Sister Helen Prejean (Sarandon) teaches adult literacy in a Catholic mission house in a New Orleans ghetto. In the film as in the book, she seems devoid of pretension or self-righteousness, and her good works are merely a necessary something she does, like eating, laughing, washing her car, or praying. So when asked by a prison ministry leader to write an inmate, she matter-of-factly agrees, thinking little of the gesture. The prison’s old-school Catholic chaplain warns her that she has no idea what awaits her in trying to minister to inmates who are, he contends, a mean and despicable lot.
And he is right, of course, but also grievously wrong in his incomprehension of his theology and the men for whom it was meant. The prisoner Sister Helen writes and then visits is Matthew Poncelet (Penn), guilty of rape and murder in a lover’s lane double homicide, and he has only a few weeks to live. She soon finds herself getting Poncelet a new lawyer, protesting the death penalty, and serving as Poncelet’s spiritual adviser as execution approaches.
Lest this sound too contrived, rather like “The Flying Nun at Alcatraz,” the filmmakers go out of their way to imbed the story, like Prejean’s actual experience, in the stark horrors of the crime, the criminal, and the costs. Brief, hauntingly effective intercuts of the murders repeatedly remind viewers just how wanton, bestial, and vicious were Poncelet’s actions. And then appear the parents of the victims, whom Sister Helen meets at pardon board hearings and execution vigils. They accuse her of selective sympathy, lavishing her care on beasts rather than the suffering bystanders, and with the stunning power of white-hot rage, they set forth the unfathomable heinousness of the crimes against their children. A last dose of hard reality comes from the killer himself, who is, to say the least, uninviting, not at all the nice-guy-framed or the good-heart who falls afoul of circumstance.
Poncelet’s character conflates the histories and personalities of two different men for whom Prejean served as spiritual adviser, and very little happens in the film that did not occur in Prejean’s encounter with them. Most folks would say that Poncelet is just plain no good, with all the moral sense of a scavenger, taking what he can when he can. He is proud of his badness–indeed, full of swagger–except perhaps for the scavenger part, which he fully denies. Poncelet features himself a tough guy, autonomous and fierce, and he proclaims indebtedness to none. Even his looks suggest his effrontery: pompadour, sideburns, well-combed goatee, and a billboard’s worth of elaborate tattoos. At the trial, he had lipped off to the judge, smirked at the verdict, and taunted his victims’ parents. In death-house media interviews, he spews white supremacist bile. During Sister Helen’s first visits, he flirts, and she rebukes him for playing silly “macho games” with “death breathing down your neck.”
In his last days, he shows no remorse, insisting he is a victim of the state and the parents who want him to “fry.” He attributes his crime to bad influences, booze, drugs, and fatigue. As a number of critics have commented, Penn the actor utterly disappears into the chasm of this man’s psyche.
It is a lasting shock to Poncelet (and viewers) that Sister Helen is a very tough nun, who cares as much about saving his soul as saving his life. To this end, she abides none of his self-dodging, his elaborate gambits of evasion that fix blame on everyone but himself. When he claims that his belief in Jesus assures him of safe passage to heaven, Sister Helen quickly disabuses him of the notion that belief by itself is “a free-admission ticket.” Rather, she says, salvation entails the hard work of owning up and regretting.
In another ploy, Poncelet compares his own execution, which he deems unjust, to Jesus’ death, and to this Sister Helen firmly replies that the two are not at all similar because Poncelet raped and murdered while Jesus “changed the world with love.” And on goes their soul-wrestle, the question of the morality of execution largely fading into the background. Ultimately, the resolute caritas of Sister Helen combines with the terror of approaching death to jolt Poncelet’s soul to honesty and remorse. Then follows his brief but deeply glad recognition that in some strange way he must “die to find love.”
At the end, Poncelet knows the fullness of the truth that sets him free, as Sister Helen has oft insisted, and in his last moments, she pronounces him a “son of God,” able at last, even as he dies, to look upon a “face of love” simply because of the perduring reality that “Christ is here.” Here, made manifest, and with stunning clarity (as Neal Plantinga said in a talk alluding to the film), Love overcomes death.
It goes without saying that redemption is a hard thing to pull off, either in life or on the screen, but here the very deep mystery of a relentless Love assumes a palpable heft, a kind of clout, that rolls right over audiences, even notably secular ones. For a while at least, viewers embrace a psycho-spiritual logic that contends it is somehow terribly important that, before he dies, Poncelet reckon with his deeds and self-deceit. Forgiveness and reconciliation matter desperately, ultimately, and not all the accumulated psycho-reductionism of our time can diminish that implacable existential demand, even in the benighted Poncelet, for whom a thousand excuses might be found. Thus we are made.
And this happens in a region of human experience of such darkness and abandonment that no light whatever seems to reach it. This is the woebegotten place to which the film hauls viewers, a place of lostness like Golgotha, a thief on the cross, a murderer strapped to a gurney. Of course, against all odds, Light does come, and it bestows joy, reconciliation, peace. Robbins and his actors distill this peculiar turn into a few minutes of luminous filmmaking that permit audiences to walk with Prejean into Poncelet’s darkness and, having absorbed that, into the glad, but wholly credible surprise of breaking Light. Somehow with the necessity of reckoning comes the thirst for reconciliation.
“Dead Man Walking” does not answer its questions about capital punishment, and big-time critics disagree on where the film comes out, which is pretty much what Robbins intended. All must wonder and wrestle. By the last scenes, it has in effect turned its attention elsewhere.
The story does not end with an execution, which suggests this is finally about more than capital punishment. After Poncelet’s death by lethal injection (Prejean’s two friends died by electrocution) comes the funeral and Prejean’s encounter with a victim’s father (Raymond J. Barry), a man whose loss has devastated his life (his wife is divorcing him, having wearied of his grief). Although Poncelet has begged forgiveness and died for his crime, this man cannot find it in his heart to forgive. With a wordless, poignant beauty, the last scene commences for Prejean and the haunted father still another journey. It begins where Poncelet’s ended: with the ever-shattering recognition that Love beckons all to the hard, deep work of reconciliation.
From death row, then, a destination where life’s starkest realities are magnified, comes a story that illumines and freshens, even for lifelong virtuosos of the church, the ever-strange wellsprings of Christian belief. Not bad, for a movie.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS and CULTURE
