My Sundance 2019 coverage continues with prisons, pretentiousness, and the paranormal!
Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu)
There’s really no way to sugarcoat this: Clemency is a hard watch. Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s unapologetically grim look at the toll taken on a death row prison warden isn’t here to moralize about capital punishment. Instead, it focuses on the nature of prisons, especially those built with invisible bars. Alfre Woodard’s astonishing performance leads us on a search for the soul of a woman who has become caretaker to the walking dead.
Warden Bernadine Williams (Woodard) is damn good at her job. She runs her prison efficiently and has overseen 11 flawless executions by lethal injection. Her twelfth execution, however, goes horribly wrong, leaving Bernadine and her prison staff irrevocably scarred. Sleep becomes a distant memory as the beleaguered warden envisions herself strapped to a gurney by the ghosts of executed inmates. Despite her insistence that she’s “just doing her job”, the nightly trips to a local dive bar suggest all of the death has become quite personal.
Clemency is not Dead Man Walking. Whereas Dead Man Walking was consumed with liberating the soul of inmate Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) before his execution, Clemency has no such illusions about salvation. Everyone in this world is somehow imprisoned. The only escape for the long-suffering defense attorney (Richard Schiff) is to retire; the only escape for the inmates is to die; the only escape for Bernadine is to crawl deeper inside herself. Yes, it’s just as grim as it sounds.
Still, director Chinonye Chukwu’s audacious debut focuses on each character’s desperate need for emotional connection. Bernadine and her husband John (Wendell Pierce) struggle to breach the growing distance between them. “I am alone,” Bernadine says as she tries to verbalize the burden of killing a man, “and nobody can fix it.” John’s repeated, tender efforts to penetrate her defenses form the emotional core of Clemency.
Behind bars, inmate Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge) searches for his own lifeline as his date with the needle approaches. He discovers the existence of a son he never knew about, and dreams of receiving a last-second pardon from the governor and starting a new family. Perhaps sensing these are the fantasies of a doomed man, Anthony smashes his head against a wall to the point of unconsciousness. If only prison bars could be erased so easily.
Regret drips from every frame of Clemency; regret for the past and a lack of hope for the future. Tight close-ups are framed by silence, as each character reflects the growing acceptance of their fate. In perhaps the most powerful dramatic moment from Sundance 2019, Anthony confronts the mother (Danielle Brooks) of his child through the glass barrier separating them. Each reveals their tortured soul with a modicum of words and a torrent of tears. It’s absolutely devastating.
There’s nothing to deconstruct here; there is only the reality of circumstance. Those trapped by those circumstances must make their own peace somehow. If that type of reflection isn’t for you, then this movie is one to avoid. If, however, you enjoy vicariously peering into the abyss, you won’t find a better opportunity than Clemency.
The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
There is much to admire about writer-director Joanna Hogg’s dramatic treatise on the collateral damage of drug addiction, The Souvenir. Though exquisitely photographed and thoughtfully observed, its inaccessibility keeps you at arm’s distance. The lack of a compelling heroine at its core creates an overwhelming sense of inertia. What’s left is a collection of arthouse pretensions that fails to deliver on the promise of emotional enlightenment.
Julie (Honor Swinton-Byre), a young English girl from the right side of the tracks, has an obsession with film. She joins film school in order to make her dream story about a boy named ‘Tony’ who is hopelessly attached to his mother. It’s only gradually that we realize Tony’s story is, in fact, Julie’s story. Instead of a mother fixation, though, Julie is fixated with her taciturn lover, Anthony (Tom Burke). Sadly, the only fixation Anthony has is with heroin.
As told through the eyes of the inexperienced Julie, we endure the grueling torture of Anthony’s self-destruction. Thankfully, director Hogg (Exhibition) avoids most of the drug addiction movie tropes. There are no exploitative scenes of drug use or screaming tantrums by a raving addict. We see only the subtle clues of addiction; the contraband, Anthony’s late night ‘errands’, and the muted affect of a junkie in the throes of his latest fix.
This realistic approach imbues the entire film with a suffocating melancholy. Fog and dread hang over the Newcastle countryside, bathing each scene with the naturalistic lighting necessary to exploit Julie and Anthony’s subdued desperation. Despite peppering the soundtrack with pop ditties from the early 1980s (when the story takes place), this commitment to realism also helps Hogg maintain the timelessness of her story.
The problem arises with the characterization of Julie, who is, quite frankly, an utter bore. Be it a flaw in writing or direction, Tilda Swinton’s young daughter, Honor, is consistently overshadowed by her co-stars (which includes the elder Swinton herself as Julie’s mother). Her quiet, aloof demeanor fails to confer her deep emotional turmoil. Worse still, she has no personality to speak of. Too often she is a spectator in her own life; a passivity that translates poorly to the screen.
Ironically, The Souvenir has much in common with Joe Berlinger’s equally unsuccessful Sundance docudrama Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Both films aim to show the collateral damage of self-destruction. Unlike Berlinger’s film, which abandons its heroine in favor of following Bundy, Hogg keeps Julie in focus and Anthony on the periphery. It’s an admirable structural conceit, thoroughly undone by Julie’s weak characterization.
The artistry will help The Souvenir connect with viewers willing to overlook the lack of an interesting main character. Most will be left bored, however, by the lack of dramatic urgency in the story. Beautiful but vacant, The Souvenir is an arthouse darling that’s easy to admire but difficult to embrace.
Light From Light (Paul Harrill)
Though life eventually blurs into an accumulation of small journeys, there are moments when we can pinpoint a journey’s beginning and a journey’s end. Light From Light, writer-director Paul Harrill’s film about a paranormal investigator’s search for answers, wonders aloud if it’s worth starting a romantic journey we know will end in pain. Don’t expect Zak Bagans and his crew from Ghost Adventures to burst through the door with their industrial light show. This is a quiet, low key affair that builds its power through conversation and reflection.
Shelia (Marin Ireland) used to be part of the Smoky Mountain Paranormal Research team. She spent her nights tramping through old houses in search of evidence of the afterlife. Now, she struggles to stay awake working the car rental counter at the airport. When she gets the call to investigate some spooky happenings at widower Richard Barnes’s (Jim Gaffigan) farmhouse, she reluctantly breaks out her video recorder and infrared gun once again. What she finds is less paranormal than existential, as the long-time loner begins to question her station in life.
At home, Shelia watches her son Owen (Josh Wiggins), a High School senior, struggle with the logic of starting a romantic relationship with his college-bound friend (Atheena Frizzell as ‘Lucy’). “What’s the point of getting together if we already know it’s going to end?” he asks Lucy in a candid but awkward conversation. When we later hear Shelia remark, “things only matter if they last”, we realize that Owen’s pronouncement is less a reflection of his worldview than Shelia’s.
Light From Light is a story told in the quiet moments when everything stops and people start talking to one another. When Shelia and Richard commiserate on the front porch – tranquil sounds of the Rocky Mountains dominating the soundtrack – you feel the full scope of two wounded people searching for answers to what comes next. Director Harrill’s camera lingers for long close-ups on Gaffigan and Ireland, allowing his actors to communicate the intangible doubts that keep them awake at night. Both actors are outstanding, with a fearless Gaffigan awash in vulnerability and a world-weary Ireland barely stifling her desperation.
The search for ghosts is secondary to the search for answers, or at least a sign that love and loss are worth all the pain. When a sign finally does arrive, it raises more questions than it answers, re-affirming our interconnectedness while making us feel lonelier than ever. Light From Light may be a small, personal film, but that doesn’t lessen the power of its conclusion. It suggests that regardless of how blissfully happy or crushingly painful the journey may be, the important thing is to face it on your own terms.
Be sure to check out my other Sundance 2019 reports here, here, and here!
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