Clemency: Death penalty drama's conventional presentation is lifted by Alfre Woodard's angst
By Liam Lacey
Rating B
What’s the psychological and moral cost to a society that administers the death penalty? That’s the question at the center of the drama, Clemency, the winner of the top U.S. drama award at Sundance last year.
Most likely, you already have your views on the death penalty. And Clemency, a rigorously earnest and unflinching look at the cruelty of the state killing process, is unlikely to change them any more than will this month’s other death-row drama, Just Mercy.
Alfre Woodard plays a prison warden whose job overseeing executions finally takes its toll.
What stays with this viewer is less the message than the performance of Alfre Woodard, the great American actress whose career has flourished mostly on television over the past four decades. Woodard has earned just one Oscar nomination - for supporting actress in Cross Creek (1983) a Martin Ritts’ movie starring Mary Steenburgen as The Yearling author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
On the other hand, Woodard scored 18 Emmy nominations along the way, including four wins.
Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, the by-the-book warden of a maximum security prison who oversees the death-by-injection executions. Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s film, which is both an indictment of the death penalty and a study a woman traumatized by her job, involves a kind of psychological double bookkeeping, between her professional pride and her ravaged emotional life.
“I’m good at my job. I’m damn good at my job,” says Bernadine, over one-too-many Johnny Walkers at the local Blue Star bar. (For a woman so guarded, Bernadine does a surprising amount of public drinking.)
Chukwu pays a documentary-like attention to death-by-injections, the form of bureaucratic killing that’s most similar to medicine: the official pronouncements, the choice of last meal (meat or vegetarian?), the precise combination of drugs and their timed delivery, to marking the official time of death.
The opening scene, Bernadine’s thirteenth execution in seven years, sets the grim tone. Things go awry: The supervising paramedic can’t find a vein, repeatedly. The convicted man’s mother is crying; the process is gruesome. Protestors are demonstrating outside the prison. And when the drugs finally enter the man’s system, he goes into convulsions. Bernadine watches impassively until we hear nothing but the sounds of death, and we watch Woodard’s face.
There’s an investigation, and we see that something has broken in Bernadine. She has sleep problems. She’s drinking more. At home, Wendell Pierce plays Jonathan, the idealistic schoolteacher who is Bernadine’s neglected spouse. He declares, in a line of kathunking irony considering Bernadine’s line of work: “I need to feel a pulse.”
This a problem with Clemency: That first scene remains the most distinctive and memorable, echoed again in the film’s final extended medium shot. In between, Clemency is constructed of long static shots, sometimes of a character saying nothing. While this slow progression signals the impersonal relentlessness of the bureaucratic mechanism, the approach begins to feel distractingly deliberate. Too often, the camera seems still holding a shot past the point where the emotion sinks in and we’re ready to move on. The script, and on-the-nose dialogue, is more melodramatically conventional than the technique.
Within the orbit of Woodard’s performance, there are other fine performances. Aldis Hodge stands out as the next prisoner in line, a young man named Anthony Woods, a convicted cop killer who may not have committed the crime, who mixes moments of tenderness with fierce isolation. Richard Schiff plays Marty Lumetta, a rumpled activist defense lawyer, who has been Bernice’s partner in this grisly dance before. They can even share drinks together and comment on the parts in which Fate has cast them. “You want to play it as good guys and bad guys and I’m one of the bad guys,” she says with bitter resignation.
Reservations aside, Clemency has moments of shivering gravity. Almost all of them involve complex emotions registered in Woodard’s extraordinary face, her dignified resistance to a turmoil of emotions within her, and her agonized need for forgiveness.
Clemency. Written and directed by Chinonye Chukwu. Starring: Alfre Woodard, Aldis Hodge, Richard Schiff, Wendell Pierce, Richard Gunn, Danielle Brooks. Clemency can be seen at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.