DEAD MAN WALKING (A-3, R)
approaches the level of the best religious movies ever made. Based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., it's a dramatized version of her work with Death Row prisoners in Louisiana. While she is opposed to the death penalty, the movie is really about reaching a condemned criminal with a valid image of Christ and Christian love.
Everybody helps make this film work, including writer-director Tim Robbins, actor Sean Penn (as the hard-shelled convict) and superb cinematographer Roger Deakins (Shawshank Redemption). But it's Susan Sarandon who makes it great--a moving (if understated) expression of Sister Helen's humble humanity and an important Catholic social ministry.
A delicate achievement (in the 1996 political climate) is the film's willingness to listen with understanding to those who resist the Church's teaching on the death penalty. (That includes just about everybody in the movie--most poignantly, the parents of the young victims who died cruelly for no reason.) Sister Helen reaches out, listens, mourns with them.
The hero of Dead Man is a woman of compassion who has the courage simply to "be there," motivated by unconditional love. Sarandon suggests it all, in her eyes, her self-deprecating manner. When the best possible ending occurs, it's not because of science or an action hero who uses force to save or heal. It's because of genuine--not sentimental--patience and kindness.
Among intriguing threads in the tapestry is the conflict between the soft-spoken nun, who so clearly represents the image of Christ, and the veteran prison chaplain (Scott Wilson), whose long experience has hardened his heart. (Nearly 30 years ago Wilson played one of the killers in the anti-death-penalty classic In Cold Blood.)
Director Robbins describes the murder, dimly but terrifyingly, in repeated, distanced black-and-white flashbacks. In his strongest moral statement, after the execution, he cuts from the bodies of the victims to that of the dead killer, suggesting a genuinely Catholic message: All killing is evil. Outstanding, artful treatment of tragic but uplifting material; recommended for mature youth and adults.
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