Dead Man Walking

365 Films

Entry #84

Dead Man Walking (1995)

Directed by Tim Robbins

Call it the Eddie Vedder effect, because like yesterday’s entry for Hype! Dead Man Walking could only have been brought to my eleven year old attention upon the year of its release because of the involvement of Eddie Vedder.  The Pearl Jam front man contributed two songs to the soundtrack, both of which were recorded as duets with the late Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.  An interesting tidbit for maybe .05% of you out there is that if you listen to Pearl Jam’s subsequent 1996 album No Code, you can hear the clear and distinct influence of Khan on songs like Who You Are, In My Tree, and I’m Open.  If anybody is still reading this, I promise I will get to Dead Man Walking at some point.  I don’t know if I should be admitting this at this point in my life but I am hard pressed to think of any other signifier that helped shape my opinion about a societal issue such as capital punishment more than this film.  Obviously, I have not based my life long objection to the death penalty solely on the story of Sister Helen Prejean and Matthew Poncelet, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t swing my moral pendulum in a certain direction.  In fact, I am all in favor of schools showing this and Werner Herzog’s Into The Abyss as a double feature whenever the issue of capital punishment comes up in class, that shit will knock them off their asses.  Before I get carried away with myself, I would be remiss not to point out that while the opinions of the filmmakers are never in doubt, this is not some simple-minded liberal screed.  First of all, the story’s focal point character, Sister Helen Prejean (played with an astonishing mix of moral fortitude and crippling doubt by Susan Sarandon) is a nun and particularly devout one at that.  Religion in cinema, especially mainstream Hollywood product is simple minded at best, insulting at worst.  You either have Mel Gibson’s join or die cinematic crusades or a certain stand-up comedians “shocking” takedown on the subject.  He shall remain nameless but let’s just say he has an HBO talk show on every Friday night at 10pm.  What is so brave about Dead Man Walking is that it gives us a portrayal of faith that is nearly impossible to categorize.  Prejean is a believer but she also acknowledges the blatant hypocrisy of the dogma.  She wants to make herself available for all who need her help yet the look of shock on her face is completely genuine when somebody points out how arrogant an approach that is to people.  That in essence, is the soul of the film, which is laid out in its very title.  Dead Man Walking implies a state of being in which two completely contradictory forces may co-exist either peacefully or not within a given institution.  I have already mentioned the established impulses within Sister Helen but one only has to look at Sean Penn’s character to see that while he is an abhorrent killer and societal deviant, he is also a frightened, sad, and pathetic human being.  The execution scene makes particularly heart breaking use of this motif in how it shows death as a mechanized process.  Buttons light up, the machine begins to whir, and the fluids are injected one by one into Poncelet’s body but Robbins never takes the focus of the scene off of Sarandon and Penn’s silent, face-to-face prayer.  This, to me gets at the heart of the piece for Robbins is not telling us what to think in any way, shape, or form.  This film is not about an innocent man, wrongfully convicted and tragically executed by the state in a thoughtless display of bureaucratized murder (which is not to say that never happens in real life, in fact, it probably does happen in real life more than it does in movies).  This film is about the humanity trapped within any number of hierarchical systems of institutions and the people working within those confines to break free.  This is one of the most thoughtful and compassionate movies about American life ever made.