Chinonye Chukwu (2019)

Clemency won the Grand Jury Prize for drama at this year’s Sundance and received its European premiere at the London Film Festival (LFF).  The writer-director Chinonye Chukwu sets out to combine a character study with a denunciation of capital punishment.  The protagonist, Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), is a Death Row prison warden.  At the start of the film, she prepares to preside over her twelfth execution.  In doing so, Bernadine seems professional yet distracted.  When a colleague (LaMonica Garrett) tries to attract her attention, he says ‘Warden’ twice without response.  Bernadine looks up at the third time of asking, when he uses her forename.

Chukwu then proceeds to a grimly detailed description of an execution.  A bungled lethal injection leaves Victor Jimenez (Alex Castillo) conscious and in agony for longer than intended.  Once Jimenez has died, a more photogenic prisoner (Aldis Hodge) appears on the screen.  He shows his handsome profile to the camera, making clear he’ll be a significant character in what follows.  This is Tony Woods, whose execution, which forms the climax to the film, will be Bernadine’s thirteenth.  Unlucky for some.  This time, there are no technical hitches but Woods, unlike Jimenez, makes a vigorous final statement, in which he asks God to have mercy on the souls of those about to kill him.  Bernadine, whose inner conflict and mental fragility we’ve watched increase throughout Clemency, goes into meltdown.  Thomas Morgan (Richard Gunn), the deputy warden, fails to get a verbal response even when he asks, ‘Bernadine – are you here?’  Her physical reply is eloquent, though.  Bernadine exits the death chamber.  She heads down the corridor and towards the camera.  She stares into it before the screen goes dark and the credits roll.

Capital punishment remains legal in twenty-nine US states.  A film dramatising the system’s wrongness and various pernicious effects has something urgently relevant to say – in theory.  In the event, Clemency, as well as preaching to the converted, is poorly thought through and predictable.  The botched Jimenez execution, for all its immediate shocking impact, encourages the viewer to feel this state killing wouldn’t have been so bad if carried out efficiently.  The opening also announces the finale:  you’re left pretty sure that the story will be bookended by executions and, thanks to the warning signs in Bernadine’s behaviour at the start, that the second one will break her.

She’s unhappily married to Jonathan (Wendell Pierce, who introduced the LFF screening), a high-school English teacher.  He tells Bernadine she’s ‘a hollow shell of a woman’.  With this sententious moaner for a husband, it’s not surprising her marriage is in trouble; but the idea, of course, is that it’s on the rocks because Bernadine is really married to a corrosive job – or ‘profession’, as she insists on calling it when Jonathan suggests they both retire.  He tells Bernadine he’s been ‘giving too much of myself to my students, not enough to me – to us’.  That order of words may be significant and Bernadine not wrong, even if she is screwed up, when she accuses her husband of always thinking of himself first.

Most of the men in the film are retiring or wanting to quit their job.  Both the Death Row chaplain (Michael O’Neill) and a convincingly worn-out-looking defence attorney (Richard Schiff) are about to bow out, while Bernadine’s deputy tells her he’s applying for a warden position in a prison that doesn’t have a Death Row.  The environment, it seems, is soul-destroying to the extent that, unless you get out while you can, it will drive you mad – a lesson Bernadine learns too late.  Chukwu verges on suggesting that capital punishment might be got rid of if there were no staff to keep the system going.  If Clemency includes any acknowledgement that people are always going to need to earn a crust, I missed it.

Although there are more than enough domestic scenes between the Williamses, the film hardly interrogates the relationship of, on the one hand, Bernadine’s supposed dispassion and by-the-book commitment to her work, and, on the other, her personal history.  She and Jonathan appear to be childless.  In Bernadine’s meeting with the parents of Tony Woods’s victim, his mother (Vernee Watson-Johnson) asks if she has children or understands what it’s like to go through what she and her husband have been going through.  Not for the first or last time, Bernadine has nothing to say in reply.  The husband (Dennis Haskins) dissuades his wife from pressing her anguished question but we seem meant to think the answer to it is no.  Bernadine’s lack of maternal feeling is presented as part of her emotional pathology but that pathology is also supposed to be the result of the system she works in.  I couldn’t make sense of how it was to blame in this respect – unless the idea of becoming a Death Row warden was so appealing to the younger Bernadine that she chose it in preference to having a family.

Clemency is formidably and monotonously earnest, qualities reflected in the claustrophobic camerawork and gloomy lighting (by Eric Branco), in the condemned-cell-drama clichés of footsteps sounding down corridors and shots of clock hands moving inexorably towards the appointed time of execution, and in acting that’s accomplished but, for the most part, overly considered.  Alfre Woodard plays the lead with impressive technical control but there’s no contrast between Bernadine’s well-groomed professionalism and her inner turmoil because signs of the latter are always evident.  Reacting to Morgan’s news that he’s applying for another job, Woodard gives her words just as much tragic weight as she gives Bernadine’s responses to much worse happenings in the course of the story.  Shortly before his execution, Tony grips the chaplain’s hand.  Aldis Hodge’s scream of terror is truly startling but he’s more often actorly and looks too good.  He receives a visit from Evette (the vivid Danielle Brooks), mother of the son that Tony has recently learned that he fathered.  Evette, who hasn’t seen him in years, greets Tony with an incredulous, ‘You look just the same’.  In fact, this is all too easy to believe:  Aldis Hodge is the picture of health.

Plenty of claptrap is spoken and it’s sometimes hard to tell if Chukwu intends it to be received that way.  When, for example, the attorney tells Tony that all anyone wants in life is ‘to be seen and to be heard, and you are being seen and being heard’, he’s presumably referring to the group of justice-for-Tony-Woods protesters stationed outside the prison.  You want Tony to demand angrily what good that is to him when he’s about to die.  Instead, he accepts the attorney’s well-meaning, worthy remark respectfully.   Well-meaning and worthy as Clemency also is, it becomes gruelling – not because it’s grappling with a thorny subject but because it treats the subject with so little insight or imagination.  Chinonye Chukwu means her title to be ironic.  The appeals of both condemned men are turned down.  Bernadine is short on human kindness.  For this viewer, the title turned ironic in another way too.  Well before the home straight, I was inwardly begging for mercy – for an end to Clemency.

2 October 2019