Berlin Day 2 - The Hollywood Reporter

Reviews
Death Row
Werner Herzog returns to the dark country of Into the
Abyss and capital punishment in America in four chilling TV docs
By Deborah Young
Satisfyingly articulate and
straightforward, but at the same time
so disquieting it leaves a queasy feeling
in the stomach, Death Row is a powerful
gathering of four 47-minute television
portraits of prisoners awaiting execution in
Texas and Florida. The morbid fascination of
true crime finds a master narrator in Werner
Herzog, who brings a very European sensibility
to the genre, along with a moral point of
view that goes beyond simply opposing the
death penalty to attempting to describe the
existence of evil in human beings.
This sounds like a very tall Germanic
order, but the films have nothing abstruse
or philosophical about them. They manage
to be engrossing, at times even with
a touch of black humor, thanks to their
uncanny closeness to their subjects, almost
all of whom have committed repulsive,
heinous crimes. Their horror is never
white-washed and they are guaranteed to
disturb even the viewer in tune with narrator
Herzog’s opening comments (which
are identical for each segment) that, as a
German coming from a different historical
background, he “respectfully disagrees”
with capital punishment in America.
For those who have seen the director’s
feature-length doc Into the Abyss, subtitled
A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, these portraits
of humanity may seem like more of
the same in a TV format. Most of the producers
and crew are identical, and at one
point Michael Perry, the teenage murderer
from Into the Abyss, makes a brief appearance.
In re-working his life-long obsession
with the subject, however, Herzog shifts the
tone from meditative abstraction to utterly
concrete realism, brushed with expressive
asides and intuitive editing. His interviewees
are still alive, for the moment, and
their stories come across less as object lessons
aimed at debating the death penalty
than as excruciatingly painful tales of woe.
Though obviously made for quality
television, where they could find the most
natural home, the four episodes have their
own weight when seen back-to-back. The
three-hour running time is off-putting,
however, and this package makes most
sense for festival exposure. The grimness
of the subject itself doesn’t foretell mass
audiences outside genre fans.
The first episode examines the criminal
pathology of James Barnes who, convicted
of strangling his wife to death, confessed
to the rape and murder of a nurse. In this
second case, he took off all his clothes,
slipped naked into his victim’s apartment
and spied on her for hours before murdering
her and setting her bed on fire to get
rid of the body. Herzog remains off-camera
as he questions Barnes in prison, trying to
contain his horror and analyze the serial
killer’s psyche. (Confessions of other killings
came during the interview.) Viewers
will agree with the puzzled director that
the voluble, intelligent and apparently
remorseful Barnes doesn¹t come across as
a monster; still less when, in an interview
with his twin sister, it emerges that he
was beaten, humiliated and probably
sexually abused as a child by the father he
loved desperately.
Rivaling the moral ambiguity of this
portrait is the slippery case of Hank Skinner,
whose wonderfully theatrical face and
24
Herzog directs a chilling
portrayal of prisoners
awaiting execution.
tendency towards overeating and hysterical
laughter makes it difficult to believe he
murdered the woman he was living with
and her two sons. After 17 years as a dead
man walking, Skinner still protests his
innocence, though a local reporter who
walks the camera crew through the crime
is convinced of the contrary. As in Into the
Abyss, Herzog lingers on the aching poverty
of town where the crime was committed,
with its vacant lots and windowless homes.
And like James Barnes, Hank Skinner is
an extraordinarily articulate raconteur of
his own life.
The other two stories are probing but
never reach these depths of psychological
portraiture. Two of the men involved in a
dramatic 2000 break-outt from a maximum
security prison in Texas, ending in
the killing of a police officer, alternate
their tales in the third episode. The robber
George Rivas describes in cinematic detail
how he planned and executed the escape of
the “Texas Seven,” in which young convict
Joseph Garcia, who took no part in the
shooting, was also condemned to death.
Both are confessed killers and both seem
incapable of murder, filling the viewer with
the feeling that, to quote Garcia’s attorney,
“It wasn’t his real self that killed the boy.”
In the intimacy of the one-on-one
interviews, Herzog gently but firmly insists
that his subjects confront their guilt and
responsibility for their crimes. He doesn¹t
get very far with Linda Carty, an undercover
DEA informer who was sentenced to
death for ordering the murder of a young
mother and the abduction of her new-born
baby. Editor Joe Bini astutely inter-weaves
the thunderous condemnation of the
District Attorney with footage of Carty’s
original police interrogation and interviews
with her daughter and one of her
accomplices, describing the background
and legal aftermath of the crime without
denying its shocking horror.
The quiet melancholy of Mark Degli
Antoni’s score is used sparingly and expressively
over police crime scene photos,
like cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger’s
bleak views of highway ditches and forlorn
American towns, cold prison towers and
the strapped gurney where the condemned
are executed by lethal injection at the rate
of one a week in Texas alone. In the end,
these brief films are persuasive by their
gentleness and their relentless insistence
that each person be viewed, first of all, as a
human being.
Sales Agent ZDF Enterprisesv
Production companies: Creative
Differences, Skellig Rock, in association with
Spring Films, Werner Herzog Films
Director: Werner Herzog
Producer: Erik Nelson
No rating, 188 minutes
day2_reviews.indd 3 2/9/12 6:22 PM