Who’s the Killer Now?

Clemency a film by Chinonye Chukwu.  With Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Wendell Pierce, Richard Schiff.  *****

Clemency is a movie about the brutality of the death penalty.  Reviewers have seen it as a character study of the female warden (Alfre Woodard) who carries the penalty out, but it’s much more than that; it takes in the whole situation, the way that putting someone to death devastates everyone involved.  It is a stark, serious, difficult film to watch, one of the most meaningful movies I’ve seen in years.  In this movie world of super heroes, robots, fantasy movies, and special effects[1], I can hardly believe this movie got made.  But if viewers want to see a truly adult movie, about a serious and important subject, this is it.

It was a stroke of genius on the part of Chinonye Chukwu to make the warden an African American woman.  It changes the whole dynamic.  But as extraordinary as Alfre Woodard is—in this and every other role I’ve seen her in—I was even more impressed with Aldis Hodge as inmate Anthony Woods.  I wasn’t as familiar with his work—though I did see Straight Outta Compton—but this is the performance of a lifetime.  In a just world, he would be nominated for an Academy Award.

Woodard is Bernadine Williams, the warden of a large prison—over a thousand inmates—in a state that still enacts the death penalty.  She is a strong woman, not afraid of controversy, and prides herself on treating the inmates fairly and with dignity, but we don’t see her with the general population.  The movie focuses on two death row inmates, Victor Jimenez (Alex Castillo), who is executed as the movie opens, and Woods, who is the focus of the story.

The Jimenez execution is botched.  First the technician can’t find a vein, then the sedative that is supposed to put him under doesn’t work, so he suffers and convulses from the drugs that kill him.  The prison blames the technician, but it hardly seems his fault; this is a possible result from lethal injection.  The truth is that there is no execution that isn’t a cold-blooded killing; lethal injection is probably the most humane, but to watch it is to realize how horrific it is.  It’s murder, performed by the state.  It’s Warden Williams job to preside over it.

We know nothing about Jimenez’ case, but find eventually that Woods’ case is under dispute: he was a part of the armed robbery that took place fifteen years before—the gunmen wore masks—but insists he did not shoot the policeman who intervened.  Various witnesses have recanted their testimony, and several jurors have now said they cannot say without doubt that Woods committed the crime.  We hear those details on a news report from a car radio.  But this movie isn’t about the facts of the case and doesn’t make a big deal of them.  It’s about the inhumanity of the whole situation.  Guilt or innocence is not the point.

Warden Williams does try to treat inmates well, but in Anthony Woods she has met her match.  When we first see him he is so silent as to seem almost catatonic; his mother has just died, and the prison doesn’t allow him to attend the funeral: the most they allow is a phone call afterwards to a family member.  Woods is isolated in a cell (perhaps just because his execution date is approaching) and isn’t permitted to put drawings he has made—simple sketches of birds flying free—on the wall.  His recreation is to be outside, but only in a slightly larger cage, where they give him a basketball but no basket.  He greets these circumstances with a silence that is dignified, but that obviously conceals a burning rage.

Warden Williams, in the meantime, is coming apart.  She can’t sleep, she’s drinking too much, and has nothing left over for her relationship with her husband (Wendell Pierce), a professor who wishes she would retire.  She says her work is not a job but a profession, and it means a lot for her to have it.  Yet at the heart of that work is this barbaric act.  When her assistant is thinking of applying for a job as head warden elsewhere, he notes that that prison does not have a death row.

Woods as is turns out is not catatonic; when he talks to his attorney Marty Lumetta (Richard Schiff), his whole affect changes—he is verbal and almost giddy—because he knows the man is on his side and believes he will succeed in getting him clemency.  Lumetta has the morally compelling role of being on the “right” side of this dispute, and doesn’t hesitate to get in digs at the warden.  “I’m going to fight for him right up until the very moment you stick that needle in his arm.”  She isn’t particularly a death penalty advocate.  We never hear her stand up for it.  It’s just part of her job.

The most extraordinary scene in the movie is when Woods meets with his former girlfriend (Danielle Brooks), who has stayed away from the prison because—unknown to him—she was pregnant when he committed his crime, and she had to remove herself to get on with her own life.  Now their son is a teenager, Woods has just heard about him for the first time, and sees the young man’s existence as a sign that there is more to his life than he’s known, there’s another life waiting for him on the outside.  She vows to visit him with her son.  The scene where Woods awaits their visit, in the presence of the warden, is one of the most heartbreaking in the movie.

Finally, though, this movie is about an immoral punishment and the way it dehumanizes everyone around it.  I know of no other movie that stays so focused on an important issue but still makes itself into a compelling story.  This isn’t a polemic; it’s a work of art, but it couldn’t make its point more clearly.  The death penalty tears apart everyone who has anything to do with it.

[1] The trailers before this movie were literally revolting, they were so stupid.  I wish theaters would publish the length of time that the previews last, so we could all arrive toward the end.