THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601260112
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
THE face of the victim. The real face. Not just the face of the life extinguished, but the face of the larger victim, the society that bears witness to murder. We hardly ever get to see that face in today's gratuitous bloodletting movie fare. That's what makes writer-director Tim Robbins' new movie, ``Dead Man Walking,'' so powerful.
Most film portrayals of horrific crime - even documentaries - unfold as good-versus-evil struggles or psychological profiles of criminals. But ``Dead Man Walking,'' which hasn't opened here yet, remembers the ``everyman'' and ``everywoman,'' we who must absorb the consequences of violence. All of us have a voice here - the families of those killed and the community at large. And isn't the absence of a voice, of control, what frustrates us when we read of one unabated crime after another, one questionable sentence after another?
``Dead Man Walking,'' one week in the life of a condemned killer and his spiritual adviser, Sister Helen Prejean, accomplishes what literature usually does better than film: It profoundly captures our common pain and fear. And in so doing, it unifies and lifts us up.
Through the remarkable Sister Helen, whose 1993 memoir of her death-row experiences by the same title inspired the movie, we bear witness: to the making of a killer, to the murders of a young couple, their parents' bereavement, the killer's redemption and punishment. We suffer every step of the way - just as we do when another stiff-backed TV newscaster tells us of the latest neighborhood bloodshed.
While Robbins intelligently and even-handedly frames all issues relevant to capital punishment, the film is not about politics or even justice. Sister Helen, the people's representative, is the true focus.
In one of the movie's most gripping scenes, actress Susan Sarandon, as Sister Helen, silently reacts to the halting, detailed living-room testimony of parents whose daughter was repeatedly raped before being shot to death. Sarandon's tear-stained, disbelieving face says it all. We empathize with the parents' unbearable loss, yet we want to be merciful. Still, we cannot ignore or condone the brutality from within.
Since innovative directors Arthur Penn (``Bonnie and Clyde'') and Sam Peckinpah (``The Wild Bunch'') proved in the 1960s that graphic violence could be stylized, beautiful and alluring, movie violence has evolved: from the gritty street realism of the '70s to the special-effects and macho-man theatrics of the '80s to today's ironic, self-conscious, detached slickness.
While real-life crime during the same time has escalated and invaded our everyday lives, movie victims have generally remained faceless. ``Dead Man Walking'' does not permit this offense. Nor does it allow for vigilante justice - victims seizing control through firearms.
There seems to be a cathartic element to numbly absorbing fictional crime in a seemingly safe movie theater - or from the couch - while life-threatening chaos lurks at the door. There also seems to be a worrisome desensitization, a removal. Or at least we talk about movie violence in such terms and wonder about its cause-and-effect with the day's headlines.
But as ``Dead Man Walking'' makes crystal clear, it is not the violence per se that demoralizes, dehumanizes, or otherwise harms or influences us, but the point of view that conveys it. When a movie about violence is told with the voices and faces of its many victims, and for the purpose of more than cheap thrills, hip satire or preachy moralizing, it can enlighten and unite. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor of the Virginian-Pilot. by CNB