Dead Man Walking (1995)

It’s posts like these that hopefully remind you that you’re reading the CUTTING EDGE of film review blogs.

I started out 2012’s relaxed-but-continuing movie project with Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking. This was actually a big one to cross off the list. In high school, I wrote a paper on the evils of the death penalty and promptly made it one of my favorite topics to debate. (It still is, to be honest.) I remember Dead Man Walking coming up in conversations with my friends in Amnesty International, and even back then I nodded and played along. I would change the subject and recommend Dancer in the Dark, which was “way better”. Had I actually seen Dead Man Walking, I may have realized no comparison should be made between these films, just because a character is put to death in both. But maybe not. In my 16 year-old heart, the death penalty was devastating across the board.

I don’t know why, but I was “fronting” when I sat down to watch Dead Man Walking more than ten years after I initially lied about seeing it. I thought, “this won’t be so bad, I can handle this”, as though those years had somehow diluted the potency of the film. I thought it might not hold up, since it was made in the 90s, after all. I saw Into the Abyss recently, and I was fine…

NOPE.

Crying, crying at various points in the film, crying like it was Bjork and not Sean Penn, crying for all of humanity, why do we do this, how can this happen, humans are a failed species, life is so backwards and fucked up, how can this be legal, reminding Josh (still crying) to never call for the death penalty if I’m murdered, ETC….

It’s not the best movie, but it got to me. Susan Sarandon got to me.

The terrible editing, however, got to me in a different way. Almost every scene had tons of quick flashbacks, especially at the beginning and end. It was like Tim Robbins didn’t trust the story on its own, and wanted to infuse it with suspense. It felt like an amateur move, but since it was only the second movie he directed, I guess it was. He made Cradle Will Rock a few years later, and that’s a REAL gem.