Perhaps the greatest cinematic tragedy of 2019 is that this movie was not widely released and its was all but ignored during awards season. Clemency tells the powerful story of the dangerous balance of a woman's soul whose duty is to watch over the incarcerated and put them to death. Few movies have the conviction or clarity of vision to attempt a character-driven drama about an executioner, and even fewer find a starring actor able to carry that weight with insight, honesty, and dignity. And then there was Alfre Woodard.
She plays Bernadine, warden of death row, who at the start oversees her twelfth execution. In a chilling opening sequence, the procedure is clinical and cold, almost silent in cool efficiency, with Bernadine hovering nearby like the Angel of Death. She simply watches, but it's clear she's in control of the situation; until, that is, the execution goes horribly wrong. The camera and editing views it all with a level, uncaring method we're meant to experience in terms of the rigid institution; it's hard, too, not to equate Bernadine with the almost sociopathic lack of humanity as blood spurts and the dying man writhes and she calmly controls the increasingly worried staff. This technique forces us into the atmosphere of traumatic, emotional horror we'll be experiencing over the next two hours.
And yet, from the outset, writer/director Chinonye Chukwu makes sure we know that, mechanically routine as Bernadine has become, she is not without hope of redemption. The opening sequence shows her walking down the hall of death row alone, and the barred gate shuts behind her in the foreground. She is as imprisoned as her wards, and her home life does little to help her fractured state of mind. She bolts upright in the night and cannot explain her emotional torture to her husband (Wendell Pierce); he tries to rekindle some affection and romance but is repeatedly rebuffed (she even recoils from his touch in one scene). Little wonder that she has probably had an affair with her deputy (Richard Gunn), an otherwise standard melodramatic turn that is expertly handled by Woodard's impossibly beautiful ability to nonverbally tell an entire backstory with a shrug, a smile, and those big wandering eyes. We get the idea that she is trying to protect her husband from the horrors of her reality, but she cannot communicate that to him. She tells him, "I am alone and no one can fix it," and we're not sure if she's articulating her soul to him or if she's reciting her self-imposed duty.
This revelation allows us to understand Bernadine's character as a double for the central character in this stage of her life. Anthony Woods (an amazing Aldis Hodge), imprisoned for a homicide years before, at first seems to be the plot device that fuels this otherwise static character drama. It is telling that both characters are black, and though little is made of race in this movie, there is a fundamental horror to the reality of black men automatically and unjustly shipped to prison for lengthy terms. Doubtless, part of Bernadine's tormented experience in this movie is due to her attempted justification of her complicity in his terminal punishment. Further, as Woods's tired, aging lawyer (Richard Schiff) continues to recite, there is plenty of reasonable doubt in his client's case. Woods is very probably innocent, and so the film focuses not on legal details but on his profound optimism: he decorates his cell with drawings of birds flying to safety in an image that reminded me immediately of To Kill a Mockingbird.
And yet the tragedy of his doom breaks him first, and we see him weeping and in the throes of shock as Bernadine coldly describes his impending death. She's just doing her duty as she asks him what he wants for his final meal and which family members should have access to claim his remains, impossible questions no human should have to ask, much less answer. And then, in a brief and shattering scene, he meets with his estranged wife (Danielle Brooks), who is also framed in such a way that suggests her own imprisonment. This scene contextualizes, for the first time, Woods as he was a free man, as he is a captive, and as he will (hopefully) be remembered. His legacy, though won't only be with his son but with the crowds of protesters outside his jail, people he cannot and will never see but who are using him to fuel their righteous rage.
In the end, it's Woodard who steals the show as she watches over the state-sanctioned murder of Anthony Woods. In a grueling long take, we experience his execution through Bernadine's face and nothing else. We watch her heart and brain battle and her facade slowly crack. We can see the poisonous dosage being injected not into Woods but into his warden; the twelve prior deaths she has witnessed finally devastate her soul until it too flies away from her body as Woods flatlines. It's the iconic moment of death, but this time it's of someone who is still alive.
If this movie had been released sooner or widely, I'd have added it to my Top 10 of 2019 list. Give Woodard all the damn awards already.
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