When I saw Alfre Woodard’s acting in “Clemency” almost a year ago when the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, I wasn’t impressed. And yet, people were raving about Woodard and the film (which won the top prize at the fest).
In the undercooked “Clemency,” this second feature from writer-director Chinonye Chukwu (alaskaLand) — the first black woman to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance — Woodard plays Bernadine Williams, an emotionally restrained (almost a little too restrained) prison warden about to oversee her twelfth execution via lethal injection. The last one she oversaw having wrecked her moral compass and made her think twice about continuing her duties.
Williams is now preparing for execution number 12. His name is Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), a convicted cop-killer and, of course, a sentimental artist in his cell, favoring drawing birds over mingling with the more testosterone-fueled inmates. This kind of heavy-handed symbolism does a disservice to the film, especially when Williams decides to hire lawyer/friend Marty (Richard Schiff) to save the bird-painting softie. His pardon could be her deliverance, as Williams starts to enter a dark phase in her life, drinking alone, not caring about her marriage with a more-than-decent husband (Wendell Pierce) and making irrational after irrational decision at work.
Chukwu’s intentions are in the right place in “Clemency,” which is passionately anti-capital punishment, but the arthouse pretensions cannot be denied either. Woodard’s Williams is an underwritten role, with tropes too obvious for compulsively watchable cinema. As an authority figure, Williams, like all of her other peers, is supposed to adhere to the rules of the law. Compassion is not part of her duty, but what changed? After 11 executions, does she finally grasp the doom and gloom nature of her work?
The press notes for the film state that Chukwu spent four years researching the death penalty in Ohio and, yet, she tackles the subject matter with deceptively simple eyes. What she injects “Clemency” with isn’t original or earth-shattering, it’s been done before in bolder and better movies (“Dead Man Walking”). We know exactly where the film is going from the very start and that, in turn, makes for a dull and uninspiring experience. [C-]