What’s the Story?
A portrait of a prison warden (Alfre Woodward from Twelve Years a Slave) who, after witnessing twelve executions, is struggling to keep in touch with her humanity. She’s become an emotionally empty functionary, drifting away from her husband and, increasingly lonely, with anyone else for that matter. She’s become the embodiment of the heartless, inhumane system that she works for. The story parallels her living death with that of a dead man walking: a (wrongly) convicted felon struggling to fend off despair and fight for clemency even as he readies himself for execution.
What’s it All About?
The story seems to take its inspiration from John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me”. Bernadine, the warden, is a diminished person, going through the motions of living in what clearly is a diminished nation. The idea is signaled from the beginning when a strapped-in convict’s last words are his recital of the Lord’s Prayer (“…forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who trespass against us”) No clemency here, as the un-forgiven, trespassed-upon convict is brutally, clumsily executed by the authorities. The law and order of the jungle, of an eye for an eye. Bernadine, who seems to exhibit human emotion only when she’s ether drunk or dreaming, seems to share a symbiotic link with the state’s next victim (Aldis Hodge) – a petty criminal wrongly accused of murder –. They’re both alienated from the comfort of family, immeasurably lonely, and incommunicatively walled off from the world in their own separate yet similar ways. Both jailer and jailed are victims of a system that degrades and dehumanizes its citizens. The difference is that he has a troop of believers and supporters who love and fight for him. She has only her alienated and despairing husband. But the supporters’ love and – Wendell Pierce- her husband’s sense of fealty are all in vain. Such decency, such belief, such desire for forgiveness and clemency can never make headway in a world thus diminished.
Why Should I see it?
Alfre Woodward’s stunning performance offers us the bi-focal vision of a woman whose main expression is one of blank nothingness, even while we see the emotional hysteria beneath the blankness. It’s an extraordinary feat. She’s a riveting screen presence. Writer/director Chinonye Chukwu’s script is a masterpiece of underwriting. She avoids the kind of grandstanding big moment speechifying that a less confident writer would have thrown in. And her understated directing is comfortable to let the story unfold in its own time…carry it own inherent drams, without the need for tricks. It’s a story of compelling real people who at the same time stand in for bigger themes of the idea of the nation
Thoroughly captivating
CLEMENCY. Writer/Director: Chinonye Chukwu. With Alfre Woodward, Richard Schiff, Aldis Hodge, Wendell Pierce. Cinematographer: Eric Branco
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