Dead Man Walking

Tim Robbins, USA 1995, 122 minutes

An extremely thought provoking and even-handed examination of the death penalty, this film was lauded by critics upon its release, and won Susan Sarandon a richly-deserved Best Actress Oscar for her understated portrayal of Sister Helen Prejean, the New Orleans nun upon whose experiences the film is based.

Sarandon is joined onscreen by Sean Penn, an actor whose rise to greatness has been slow and unsteady, but whose time has finally come, as anyone who saw his knockout performances here and in Brian DePalma's Carlito's Way will testify. Here he plays Matthew Poncelet, a sneering, arrogant piece of Louisiana white trash who has been found guilty of the sexual assault and murder of a nice young middle class couple. This is the main difference between this film and other, similar, death row movies - here there is no doubt as to Poncelet's guilt. The various courtroom scenes such as the appeal and the clemency hearing are not charged with the usual frisson of hope, but more with the workaday air of routine timewasting.

Sarandon is appointed as Penn's spiritual counsellor during his last days on death row, and the bulk of the scenes are simple conversations between the two of them, with Sarandon calmly pleading him to repent while he protests his innocence and shouts about appeals and lie-detector tests.

With an issue as sensitive and fraught with potential pitfalls as this, director Tim Robbins manages to present a remarkably unbiased film, with all the usual arguments for and against the death penalty given more or less equal weight. Fervent opposers of capital punishment may well find themselves questioning their beliefs during some of the scenes where Helen talks to the parents of the victims. Equally, death-penalty advocators may have a hard time with the languid, almost dreamlike mechanical brutality of the execution scene itself: a long, drawn out process contrasting sharply with the rushed panic of the final scene of Kiezslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Despite an occasional tendency to take the religious metaphors a little far, this is a stirring and important film.

"Sarandon as ever is superlative, Penn is beyond superlatives ****" - Empire

Review by Ben Stephens
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97