“I’ll be the face of love for you,” Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) tells a soon-to-be-executed murderer.
The idea that a film can transcend (or sidestep) political ideologies has always been questioned, but the intertwining of the moral and the political has certainly been on the rise in the fourteen years since Dead Man Walking crested at #15 on the 2005 version of the A&F Top 100. Have viewers become more aware of faults within the film or have their attitudes changed? I would argue the latter. Robbins’s film was never as apolitical as Prejean’s book, but his politics (and those of Sarandon) unquestionably create a lens through which those from different ideologies can more easily dismiss the film. For example, while Matthew Poncelot (Sean Penn) is a composite, selective details about the execution process are changed, and it is hard to look at the crucifixion pose of the lethal injection scene and accept Robbins’s word that it is simply a historical irony.
That said, Robbins does give voices to the victims’ families and faces (as much as he can) to the victims themselves. The sequencing of flashbacks suggests that Prejean the character might admit to more doubts about her righteousness than would her chroniclers.
But what ultimately makes Dead Man Walking so remarkable is not that it is on the right side of a political issue but rather that it remembers that the “right” side of an issue changes with the times and those who do not bend a knee to the spirit of the age must have something outside themselves to guide them lest the pressures to conform break them.
Like Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons, Prejean comes across as a likable emblem of virtue rather than a scold. Perhaps her gender makes her slightly less confident in her convictions, but that makes the way she acts on them all the more impressive. And by insisting that the worst humans are still human, the film none-too-subtly insists that to be pro-life is something more, something greater than just being against the selective termination of certain lives
— Kenneth R. Morefield (2022)
- Directed by: Tim Robbins
- Produced by: Jon Kilik Tim Robbins Rudd Simmons
- Written by: Helen Prejean Tim Robbins
- Music by: David Robbins
- Cinematography by: Roger Deakins
- Editing by: Lisa Zeno Churgin Ray Hubley
- Release Date: 1995
- Running Time: 122
- Language: English
Arts & Faith Lists:
2004 Top 100 — Unranked list
2005 Top 100 — #15
2006 Top 100 — #21
2020 Top 100 — #53