LFF#12 Into The Abyss
In the context of the capital punishment debate the name ‘Perry’ invokes memories of Truman Capote’s novella In Cold Blood, the acclaimed 1966 meld of journalism and literature which covered the brutal execution of the Clutter family at the hands of two criminal drifters Richard Hickcock and Perry Smith, both of whom went to the gallows three years later on a frigid and wintry November morning. In his latest documentary Werner Herzog treads similar ground to Capote with his latest documentary Into The Abyss, an autopsy of the state execution of Michael Perry, a death row denizen convicted of a horrific triple homicide in Conroe, Texas. Along with his possible accomplice Jason Burkett (who managed to get his conviction reduced to a life sentence) both individuals deny their primary involvement in the horrendous crime, apparently committed in order to steal a car from the home of a middle class family in a local gated community. After the woman of the house was shot dead the duo then kidnapped the families teenage son and his friend as they exited the enclave, as potential whistleblowers they were led into some undergrowth some miles from the original killing before being executed by moonlight, their uninterred bodies discovered some days later by a local dog-walker. Where Capote almost seemed to sympathize with his subject, fostering a sense of empathy with Hickcock and more importantly Smith and his traumatized upbringing Herzog takes a distanced approach and lets the facts speak for themselves, opting for an almost sociological view of the criminals and the emotional fallout suffered by the victims surviving relatives, an appreciation of criminality as a societal product spawned by economic and cultural conditions, rather than any notion of an intrinsic set of skewed morals or an evil disposition.
It’s an interesting approach which unfortunately doesn’t quite gel and the film loses significant focus as it progresses, with a muddled ideology that is difficult to ascertain other than the universally accepted (well, apart from the spittle flecked right-wing mentalists) truth that the death penalty is morally repugnant, that it does nothing in the way of deterrence, that is based on some questionable notion of state sanctioned revenge and the prospect of innocents being killed through corrupt or warped convictions surely disintegrates any claim for advocacy by any reasonable minded adult. After the criminal scenario is established through the documentarian interviews of talking heads of the victims extended families and a visit to the scene of the crimes (including some eerie police footage of the domicile with lights and TV blazing 48 hrs after the killing, like some domestic Marie Celeste) Herzog seems uncertain in what he’s trying to achieve with this piece, and the result is somewhat muddied and perplexing. Like some sort of bizarro world sniffer dog his ability to divine the oddballs of the world are present and correct, in this case the unusual phenomenon of the women who fall in love with death row prisoners, or the sister of one of the victims who reels off a litany of death, suicide, fatal health conditions and accidents which have struck down just about everyone in her extended family, or perhaps most arrestingly the former death row warden turned campaigner against the process in one of the films more moving sequences are all intriguing and memorable characters, but these are the only scattered highlights in a rather lacklustre, scattershot affair. The differing recollections of Perry and Burkett of what actually occurred is not satisfactorily investigated, and a balanced debate from those whom support the penalty is severely lacking (I think you have to let people air these odious and incorrect views so they can be properly discredited), with such a potent and emotive subject matter you’d expect a far more involving and moving result which is sadly not the case. Herzog touches on the notion of a cycle of incarceration and poverty potentially being passed from father to son, a sort of poisonous genetic curse which is worthy of debate but not fully exhumed, even as we slowly learn the family background of Burkett (whose father is serving a life sentence for drug dealing and violence) you realise his chances were somewhat compromised, yet the elements of free will, of choice or any sort moral precepts are not activated in what you’d expect from Herzog’s usual robust intellectual flair. A mis-fire then in relation to some of his recent non-fiction – if you haven’t seen Cave Of Forgotten Dreams yet then you need to treat yourself – but then again it won the best LFF documentary prize so I clearly don’t know what I’m talking about;
Phew, so that’s the LFF for another year. It’s taken me much longer than anticipated to finish off these reviews, in my defence you try delivering the most successful business conference in the region whilst being in the midst of re-profiling your £7 million EU programme in a fraction of the time required for such complexity whilst maintaining your sanity, as well as beginning to plan for numerous other developments you can see approaching on the horizon. Still, I managed fourteen films which translates roughly into a film a day, and I think I managed a good spread of material from the indie and mainstream US sectors, to the European fare, from a couple of documentaries to the highest quality indigenous UK offerings, including the likes of Shame, Kevin and my personal favourite Martha Marcy which will represented somewhere in the films of the year that I’m starting to put together.
Minty's Menagerie 
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