Movies have, over time, proved to be a very effective way of spreading ideas around, for better or for worse, and sometimes this is done overly so. Should I be surprised a movie starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, written and directed by Sarandon’s former partner Tim Robbins, has a distinctly leftwing point of view to it? Of course not. All three of them have been outspoken on left-leaning political opinions for years, particularly Sarandon. So, really, I go into the 1995 anti-capital punishment movie Dead Man Walking expecting a certain amount of that.
That doesn’t guarantee the quality of the movie, of course. It still has to tell an effective story. Besides, it’s one of the last few movies on my HBO Max Watchlist leaving at the end of the month.
Based on the memoir of a crusading nun, Sarandon stars as Sister Helen Prejean. She works heavily with the poor and the downtrodden across Louisiana, and from what we see in flashbacks, she been that way since childhood. She’s been in correspondence with convicted rapist and murderer Matthew Poncelet (Penn), and he sends her an unexpected request: can she work on getting him a final appeal to perhaps save his life? He won’t be getting out of prison, but at least he won’t be put to death. Being a devoted follower of Jesus, Sister Helen agrees and soon becomes wrapped up in Poncelet’s case, getting a lawyer to work for him and putting whatever influence she can on getting him something of a reprieve. Her other goal is to get Poncelet to accept Christ’s love and salvation for himself. Poncelet, for his part, never makes it easy for her.
However, Sister Helen doesn’t just do what she can to help Poncelet. Poncelet was convicted of killing a teenage couple, and Sister Helen reaches out to both sets of parents as well. The boy’s father at least will talk to her. The girl’s parents, well, not so much when they realize why she’s there. Along the way, Sister Helen will see resistance from the general public, prison officials, elected officials, and even some of the kids she helps after Poncelet makes a lot of white supremacist statements during a TV interview. Through is all, Sister Helen will not give up on Poncelet or her faith, up to the moment Poncelet is executed for his crimes.
Now, as I suspected, this is not a subtle movie. Though the movie never suggests for a moment that Poncelet is innocent–indeed, it even shows him committing the crime in well-timed flashbacks–but at the same time, the movie goes to great lengths to show he isn’t just some cruel monsters as his victims’ parents seem to think. Yes, he has some reprehensible views, but at the same time, they aren’t quite so black-and-white, as when Sister Helen gets him to admit he admired MLK, so his problem is less with people of a certain race as they are with people who are lazy and don’t fight for something regardless of race. Granted, that seems to be the same reason he later says he admired Hitler, but the suggestion is also he became a white supremacist in prison and not outside of it. Likewise, he has family he cares about and can even seem fairly normal with when they meet. The movie’s argument is not to let people like Poncelet get away with crimes. It’s more like there are better ways to punish a man than executing him.
It helps that Robbins got strong performances out of Sarandon and Penn for this, but that’s hardly surprising. Penn especially can be a very intense actor, and neither of them do things by half. If anything, my biggest issues with the movie is how blunt it gets during the execution scene, having Poncelet blatantly say murder is wrong no matter who commits it, juxtaposing the clinical impersonalty of the lethal injection with the more violent crime he committed that got him in prison in the first place, and even showing his victims’ reflections in the glass watching him die. I am sure that, to a certain extent, movies with messages can’t be subtle, but this one was a bit much.
On a side note, Jack Black appears as Penn’s brother in a couple scenes, and the one he actually has lines in, well, he sure does stick out. His later fame did somewhat take me out of the movie for a moment, and that was just a little weird for me.
Regardless, the movie does seem to walk a tightrope between condemning both Poncelet’s crime and capital punishment, and I think the movie largely accomplished that.
Grade: B+
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