I recall that I didn’t expect to like this when it popped up on cable back in the ’90s, and then was blown away by the raw emotion on display and impressed that the movie didn’t stack the deck to make its case.  This is an advocacy piece; it’s meant to persuade the viewer that capital punishment is wrong.  But it doesn’t do so by presenting a case of an innocent person put to death, or even someone who might evoke some sympathy⁠—the convict here is a mushmouthed cretin covered in swastika tat­toos.  (At one point he reconsiders his rhetorical strategy in his campaign for clemency: “I wish I hadn’t said all that shit about Hitler and being a terrorist. Stupid!”)  The movie also doesn’t try to soft-pedal his crimes: we see flashbacks of him raping a teen­age girl and shooting her boyfriend in the back of the head while his partner stabs the girl to death, and we meet the distraught, shattered families of his victims.  The idea is to make the case that it is wrong, not just for the state to kill the innocent, or to kill people with redeeming qualities, but to kill anyone.  Because even a white supremacist rapist/murderer is not a monster but a human being, and that makes him a son of God.

And that is where the movie lost me this time around, because I no longer have the patience for this sort of thing.  Like I wrote about The Irishman:

Frank Sheeran […] commits murder after murder seem­ingly without even a glimmer of recognition that there might be moral implications to this.  But he’s not com­pletely inhuman. […] And Scorsese’s primary concern seems to be, how does a good Catholic priest properly minister to such a man?  How do you serve as an instru­ment of God’s infinite mercy on behalf of a murderer who, to human eyes, seems eminently unworthy of it?  How do you help him turn his regrets about the ultimate course of his life into true, soul-saving repentance?  The problem is that to viewers who find these concerns to stem from a worldview rooted in silly superstition, the answer to these questions that lie at the heart of the movie is “who the fuck cares”.

Pretty much the same thing here.  Theological issues are at the forefront.  In fact, Dead Man Walking delves into them a bit more deeply than does The Irishman, giving us a debate over what “soul saving” actually means.  The prison chaplain seems to think of it as just a matter of engineering a deathbed conversion, telling the nun that her job is to get the murderer “to understand that Jesus died for his sins”, and, presto, no hellfire for him!  The nun, by contrast, is more concerned with “grace and reconcilia­tion”, with nudging the murderer out of his denials and getting him to accept responsibility for his crimes so he can “die with dignity”.  (As I recall, this was also a big concern for Jim Jones.)  Beyond these squabbles among the clergy, the film presents a larger debate between a community full of right-wing Chris­tians⁠—for this is the Deep South⁠—who declare “An eye for an eye!”, and a much smaller group of left-wing Christians, such as the nun, who hold candlelight vigils for the executed.  A member of the prison staff tries to cite Scripture to defend the death pen­alty, but quickly gives up when he finds himself outgunned: “I ain’t gonna get in no Bible quoting with no nun ’cause I’m gonna lose.” That might have been a fist-pump moment for the liberals in the audience, especially in the ’90s⁠—a big part of Bill Clinton’s pitch for being the candidate to lead the Democrats to victory after twelve years in the Reagan/Bush wilderness was that he could speak to Bible belt voters in their own language, and here was the same sort of thing happening on screen.  But I’m not a Bible belt voter, and I don’t consider it much of a coup to trump 3000-year-old drivel with 2000-year-old drivel.  I might as well have been watching a movie from Turkmenistan with advocates of opposing sides quoting contradictory parts of the Ruhnama at each other.

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