<em>Clemency</em> Explores the Toll of Making a Living From Death
In the agonizing early minutes of Clemency, a new film from the writer-director Chinonye Chukwu, the prison warden Bernadine Williams is confronted with an unexpected question while she supervises a death-row execution: When a mundane atrocity goes awry, does the horror lie only in its divergence from standard procedure? Bernadine (played by Alfre Woodard) is overseeing her 12th execution, a harrowing scene: After the terror-stricken inmate, Victor Jimenez (Alex Castillo), is strapped to a gurney, medical staff struggle repeatedly to find a suitable vein for the lethal injection. Victor’s mother cries on the other side of the viewing glass. He recites the Lord’s Prayer through tears. And then, as the chemicals enter his body, he begins to seize. Blood spurts. Bernadine shields the scene from horrified onlookers, aghast at the apparent miscalculation.
Though she maintains her unfolds, she grows unable to look away from the routine cruelty of her post. Woodard, who also co-produced the film, plays Bernadine with tremendous restraint. Her face threatens to crack under the dual pressures of enacting quotidian violence and suppressing her own emotions afterward; her back is an unyielding plane. Another condemned inmate, Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), witnesses Bernadine’s slow unraveling as she prepares for his execution, her 13th. connects the pair to each other, and to the people around them, to wrenching effect. The implication—that the scourge of capital punishment erodes humanity well outside the execution chamber—is reinforced throughout the film.
