SPOILERS FOLLOW:
With due and genuine respect -- for craigbeaton1970's take is a thoughtful one deserving that -- I strongly disagree with his conclusion:
The point of this film was in large part to dramatize how BANAL even the most horrible of real-life crimes actually are. Most people convicted of capital murder and executed aren't brilliant criminal master-minds. Most of their victims aren't exotic or romantic, but ordinary people who kinda sorta were in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time, the victim of some impulse. (Capote's "In Cold Blood" pioneered the exploration of this theme, and is still a classic of the genre in its power to make that exact same point, albeit from a generation earlier.)
Note that this capital murder was not one of premeditation, at least not as portrayed. Depending on when you start keeping count (and if you exclude the attempted car theft), there may have been no continuous pattern of violent criminal activity before the first shooting. (The criminal didn't shoot, even in self-defense, at the guy who caught him mid-car theft on either occasion he had the chance to, he merely brandished the gun, which he'd found by accident.) And clearly, the criminal's intention to commit the armed robbery at the grocery store developed within seconds of him firing the fatal shot at the clerk. The clerk was shot in a struggle for the gun, rather than cold-bloodedly. The criminal's decision to grab the kid as a hostage was likewise a spur-of-the-moment one, not premeditated. He tried to get the kid out of the trunk after the entirely accidental car crash; he'd been shouting reassurances to the kid that it was "almost over"; he clearly didn't desire the kid's death.
In short, this is a classic example of a pair of "capital felony murders" -- the commission of two unintentional homicides during the course of the performance of another felony. The felony murder rule is a legal fiction which automatically translates the specific criminal intent to commit a lesser felony (here, armed robbery) into sufficient criminal intent to embrace predictable consequences (someone might get killed during a struggle for the gun or an attempted escape from an armed robbery). Some states also make killing a child, at least in some circumstances (including the commission of another felony), into capital murder, so that could have been an alternative basis for the sentence. And yes, in a large handful of states, this exact same pattern would, fairly predictably, lead to conviction of capital murder plus conviction on the "aggravating circumstances" necessary to impose a death penalty.
The execution of sentence was grim but stripped of drama; but that is EXACTLY the way such sentences are executed in real life in those states whose legal authorities take enforcement of their capital punishment laws seriously. The screenwriters could have put in some last-minute calls from the governor's office with a reprieve -- maybe a wrong number, maybe a Supreme Court Justice trying but failing to get the crucial 4th vote for another stay -- but that would have been contrary to the POINT of the whole film.
Certainly the dialog between the preacher and the prisoner about God's will is intended to highlight the "unintended consequences" theme; indirectly, I'd argue, it also supports the "ordinary people/no extraordinary plot" explanation.
The art of the film, if it has art -- and I think it does, in fair measure -- is in evoking the viewer's powerful emotions and reactions NOTWITHSTANDING the lack of a "punch" anywhere, and despite the banality.
I agree, for what it's worth, with craigbeaton1970's evaluation of the principal actors' performances. I disagree, however, that their dialog was clichéd; it was, perhaps, mostly ordinary. But "I forgive you" -- obviously the climactic line of the entire film -- while perhaps predictable (although I'm not sure of that) and certainly plain, was nevertheless, in my opinion, still incredibly powerful. And more to the point it's what a real person -- an ordinary person of modest education and status -- would indeed have said. Her mean means don't make her ignoble, nor does the character's lack of eloquence turn her lines into clichés.
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tworeeler
15 years ago
Well said. So much more effective than more "obvious" movies like "Crash", where you're hit over the head with a moral (or "punch", so to speak).
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