‘Dead Man Walking’ Riveting Look At Death Row

In “Dead Man Walking,” her nonfiction book about the death of two convicted killers, Sister Helen Prejean constructs as convincing an argument against the death penalty as may ever have been put on paper.

In his film adaptation of Prejean’s book, writer-director Tim Robbins is less interested in making an argument about capital punishment one way or the other. In fact, one could argue that Robbins’ film is as much an argument for legalized killing as not.

Even so, the movie, like the book, is a powerful portrayal of the modern art of human sacrifice. From its flashback recreations of murder, which are played out as random acts of unchecked rage, to its drawn out depiction of societal payback, which is a studied act of Old Testament justice, “Dead Man Walking” is a riveting experience.

Paramount among its strengths is the performance of Sean Penn, who ranks with a handful of today’s more-talented actors and may be the only one capable of doing what’s needed here - not just playing but virtually inhabiting a character.

Penn portrays Matthew Poncelet, a twentysomething hardcase living for the moment on the Louisiana state prison’s death row. I say for the moment because his time is nearly up. After a six-year process of appeal, Poncelet is approaching the date of his scheduled execution for participating in the brutal murder of two teenage lovers.

And it is just at this time that Sister Prejean (Susan Sarandon), a nun working out of a charity house in New Orleans, makes his acquaintance. Convinced by a concerned prison activist to write the young inmate, Prejean ends up driving to the prison to meet him.

She stays on to advise him, help him find competent legal help and, when his legal maneuvers finally run out, she ends up sticking around to make sure that the last face he sees will be one filled with love.

The sojourn isn’t an easy one. A composite of the book’s two condemned convicts, Poncelet, vividly portrayed by Penn, doesn’t give her much to love. He is, at least at first, a strutting peacock of hatred and racial antagonism. A self-styled prison dandy, whose pompadour and mustache-goatee are as carefully coiffed as they are indicative of his biker-wannabe mentality, Penn’s Poncelet uses a twisted vision of pride to stonewall the world at large.

Only under Prejean’s determined and tenacious guidance does the side of this man that respects Hitler finally meld with the side that is genuinely sorry for the hurt he has caused his mama. And when the complete man finally faces the enormity of his actions, his carefully constructed facade crumbles like quicklime.

In both the book and the film, the experience is life-changing for Prejean, too. She encounters the legal arguments against state-sanctioned execution and she receives a firsthand education about the exact methods of the procedure (the film explores lethal injection instead of the book’s examination of electrocution). As a result, she becomes a committed death penalty foe.

But she learns more, too. She learns about her own fears - fears of young men capable of unmerciful crimes, fears of families whose anger wards off her attempts at offering comfort, fears that her efforts aren’t good enough to save a murderer’s immortal soul.

“Dead Man Walking,” then, represents a path to salvation for both these vastly different characters. Fittingly, it is their scenes together - especially as Poncelet’s time runs out - that make up the film’s most affecting moments.

Sarandon isn’t allowed to explore the same emotional range as Penn. Her Prejean is all sympathy, even in her moments of doubt and fear. Rage is not in her vocabulary.

Her best moments, then, come as she listens as others unburden themselves of the awful pain they carry, her soulful eyes filling with tears, as if swollen by this world of hurt.

Robbins, still a young writer-director, burdens his film with occasional excesses. Some of the dialogue between Prejean and her family sounds the way people talk only in movies. And an execution scene is protracted and filled with too many, perhaps inadvertent, Christ-like references.

But Robbins paces his scenes effectively, and he captures well the mood of Prejean’s book, whether the setting is a poor New Orleans neighborhood, the lonely emptiness of a grieving parent’s living room or the sterile, confined atmosphere of a death row cell.

A good supporting cast adds immensely, whether it be Scott Wilson as a prison priest, Margo Martindale as Prejean’s fellow nun, Raymond J. Barry as a grief-stricken father or Roberta Maxwell as Poncelet’s long-suffering mother.

In the end, “Dead Man Walking” may not change your mind about capital punishment. It will, however, show you all that deadly procedure entails. It takes the polite mask off a kind of killing as old as humankind itself.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: These sidebars appeared with the story: “DEAD MAN WALKING” ***-1/2 Location: Lyons and Coeur d’Alene cinemas Credits: Directed by Tim Robbins, starring Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Robert Prosky and Raymond J. Barry Running time: 2:05 Rating: R

OTHER VIEWS Here’s what other critics say about “Dead Man Walking:” Jay Carr/The Boston Globe: Too much of what calls itself religion is merely hate repackaged. What makes “Dead Man Walking” a startlingly radical movie is that there’s no hate in it. This film runs deeper than any mere anti-death-penalty polemic. In fact, the Christian idealism it so unswervingly espouses means it is one of the few films that can genuinely be called religious. But there’s no self-righteousness in it. Its triumph lies in its remarkable evenhandedness, its absence of shrillness or cheap histrionics. Amy Dawes/Los Angeles Daily News: It’s rare for a movie nowadays to take on spiritual concerns, let alone do it this effectively. Henry Sheehan/Orange County Register: Although it’s based on a nonfiction book by New Orleans nun Sister Helen Prejean, Tim Robbins’ adaptation of “Dead Man Walking” resorts to all the tricks of soap opera to score its points. It gets so twisted around as it tries to manipulate the audience it doesn’t seem to notice that its point - that the death penalty is morally indefensible - is completely subverted in the process. Janet Maslin/New York Times: The casting of Sean Penn as the convicted murderer on death row in Tim Robbins’ quietly courageous drama about capital punishment, reveals a lot about this film’s exceptional mettle.