One more film that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar last February, never actually having seen it before, was Dead Man Walking. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this review, and saving it to post at some future date since I'm a couple weeks ahead on reviews and have multiple reviews saved in draft for when I have a bunch of films from a Star of the Month to write about.
Susan Sarandon plays Helen Prejean, CSJ, a Catholic nun from one of those orders that apparently believes not just going out in the community, but not requiring its nuns to wear a traditional habit to do so. She works with Sr. Colleen in an adult education center in and around the projects of Slidell, LA, doing some of the sort of social work you can expect from such a group of nuns. Somehow, a letter from one of the prisoners on death row comes to her attention; the Catholic Church, believing in redemption, has a prediposition to ministering to people like those on death row. So Sr. Helen decides she's going to take on a challenge, never having done anything like this before.
Sr. Helen goes to the peniteniary to meet the prisoner in question, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). (Poncelet is not in fact a real person but a composite of two of the prisoners the real Sr. Helen ministered to.) Poncelet is on death row for his part in the rape and murder of two high school sweethearts. He, for his part, insists that he should receive a commutation because, while he was at the scene, he wasn't the one who pulled the trigger, but his friend Carl. Sr. Helen agrees to support him abt the commutation hearing and appeals, despite the regular prison chaplain (Scott Wilson) warning her that death row inmates can be nasty, manipulative people who claim to want redemption but are only using this as a tacti to prey upon innocent little women like Sr. Helen.
Sr. Helen goes to the hearings, and is buttonholed after one of the hearings by... the parents of the two murder victims, Mr. Delacroix (Raymond Barry) and the Percys (R. Lee Ermey and Celia Weston). These three are, needless to say, not particularly happy with Sr. Helen's work with Poncelet. Doesn't she know that there was grieving family left behind? Couldn't she have been bothered to listen to their side of the story rather than just naïvely accepting Poncelet's story? So Sr. Helen goes to see the Percys and Delcroix to talk to them in more detail while also talking to Poncelet's mother and siblings, to get a much more complicated view of the case.
Along the way, as she keeps talking to Poncelet himself, she finds that he is in many ways the sort of thoroughly nasty person the chaplain said death row inmates can be. Poncelet can be arrogant, violent, and certainly a nasty racist even though the two murder victims happen to be white. The appeals fail, and Poncelet's execution date is set, with Sr. Helen offering to be the spiritual advisor to Poncelet. This leads up to a climax that's part I Want to Live! and part Angels with Dirty Faces.
The real life Sr. Helen Prejean is a noted advocate against capital punishment, and the movie is based on her own memoir also titled Dead Man Walking. As I've mentioned myself on several occasions, I don't trust the state to mete out capital punishment, although I come at this view from a rather different starting point than most anti-death penalty people. (I'd argue, for example, that a lot of the people who claimed to oppose police brutality when it visited George Floyd suddenly became a lot more accepting of police brutality, and deliberately harsh sentencing, on January 6, 2021.) But where I hated the climax of I Want to Live! because it was horrendously propagandistic, Dead Man Walking is much more nuanced: yes, the people involved in making the movie oppose the death penaly, but they also show us that a lot of the Matthew Poncelets of the world are in fact nasty people who destroy the lives of a whole lot of people they leave behind.
Dead Man Walking is also helped by outstanding performances from the two leads. So if you haven't seen it before, do yourself a favor and watch Dead Man Walking.
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