Penn keeps his performance low-key the more to move us when his death approaches

Penn keeps his performance low-key, the more to move us when his death approaches. Then the veins on his forehead stand out, twining into a cicatrice of anguish.Susan Sarandon deserves her Best Actress Oscar for conveying goodness without seeming bland or sanctimonious Much of the movie rests on Sarandon’s reactions to Penn. She combines assurance with worry, serenity with intellectual inquiry: there is a sense of moral quest. Sarandon acts wonderfully with her big saucer eyes, conveying compassion, fear, and surmise – a sense of her eagerness to pounce and take up any hint of Matt’s readiness for salvation. She is aided by a script which gives due weight to the subtlety and tenacity of Sister Helen’s mind.

If you are looking for the source of Sarandon’s remarkable performance, watch carefully a prayer vigil outside the prison. A nun can be seen, tender yet alert – Sister Helen herself.The movie is less successful when it moves away from its two principals and tries to give a sense of the lives affected by Poncelet. Sister Helen visits the two families of the victims; but their pain, though moving, illustrates the argument rather than grows organically from the drama. Likewise, the odd flashback to her childhood (“You were always taking in strays”) and scenes showing her family’s complacent incomprehension of her mission feel rigged – another part of the thesis.

For all its balance and subtlety, Dead Man Walking is undeniably didactic; often scenes have the heaviness of a dissertation rather than the airy unpredictability of drama.Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing, which also argued the moral equivalence of murder and execution, had a sense of mystery and awe that put its arguments into a deeper perspective Dead Man Walking is too stiff and structured. Tim Robbins’s direction is intelligent and detailed to the point where it becomes over-calculated. Nothing succeeds better in drawing the film away from its pamphleteering straightness than its music (mainly provided by the Pakistani singer Nuarat Fateh Ali Khan and the Armenian dudouk player, Djivan Gasparyan), which has a mournful quality, somewhere between a dirge and a primordial wail at the fall of man.As an argument against the death penalty, Dead Man Walking graphically illustrates what Orwell called the “unspeakable wrongness” of capital punishment. But it is more powerful emotionally than intellectually; it milks the imminent horror, as if the whole movie was on death row.