Silence is used as a weapon in Chinonye Chukwu’s sobering death row drama “Clemency”. Prison warden Bernadine Williams explains the rules of the last meal and execution to a death row inmate, who listens on in stolid silence. But, before this particular scene, throughout the film, various characters will make pleas of professional and personal natures to Bernadine, and she will react with stony-faced silence. The film’s final moment depends on an almost aggressively sustained bit of silence that comes to overwhelm us as we zero in on her face in an emotionally charged moment. Speaking is often identified with having control, but here Chukwu seems to be arguing for absence, or inaction, as a way of controlling the narrative. How can someone take control, no matter how arbitrarily, of a situation?
Control is a running theme in “Clemency,” which focuses on Bernadine Williams, played by Alfre Woodard, who is a warden at a men’s prison where a number of the men are on death row. It’s a job she takes seriously. She is exacting. She is precise. She follows the rules. She is good at this, commanding respect and keeping everything in place. But a job that depends on taking life can take a toll on an individual, and Bernadine’s calm exterior begins to crack as a crisis at work intensifies. The clemency of the title concerns a last-ditch attempt to get convict, Anthony Woods, pardoned for a robbery and double homicide. He insists that the double homicide was not him. The courts disagree. But as this case begins to become a lightning rod for relationships at home and work, the mercy of the title seems as much for Woods as it is for Bernadine, a woman trapped within the rules of a job that threatens her own mental health.
Of the 50 films I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year, no union between director and actor is as strong as the one between Chinonye Chukwu and Alfre Woodard. This is the Nigerian director’s second full-length feature, which she also writes, and “Clemency” emerges as a taut duet between director/writer and actor as Chukwu and Woodard work seamlessly in sync to lay bare the reality of this woman’s pain. By the end of the first act, the film will seem to be running two plot-lines – Bernadine’s domestic issues with her husband, who feels estranged from her, and Bernadine’s professional issues, concerned about the political fall-out of Woods’ upcoming execution. Everything in “Clemency” seems to be moving just a beat too slow. Chukwu lets her camera linger a beat too long on a shot of a prisoner trapped in his cell, or a second too long on Bernadine, staring back at the relative of a murdered man. The aesthetic here is one of unencumbered bareness, as if confronting us with lives that are overwhelming by virtue of their starkness. In this way, “Clemency” is paced like a horror movie with the camera moving slowly, painstakingly slowly, down corridors and into rooms just on the brink of something troubling. This works best in a third-act scene of self-inflicted violence that prompted a collective gasp from the audience.
In some ways, Chukwu’s script makes it easy for us to root against the death penalty as it tips the scales in Woods favour. It diverts from something like Tim Robbins’ “Dead Man Walking”, avoiding the more unsavoury aspects of a death row inmate, and offering something more obviously sympathetic. But within this choice, the film is offering something cogent about the inequalities and injustices baked into the penal system. “Clemency” may skirt difficulty by presenting some tidy aspects to its convict, but this is not an indictment of the justice system per se. “Clemency” instead asks what happens to those forced to become caretakers of a difficult system. Before dying, a prisoner’s final words includes the chilling indictment, “For those who are about to take my life, may god have mercy on your soul.” The sacrosanct nature of human life is one of the unceasing tenets that runs across cultures, across religion, and it’s that consistent thread that makes the death penalty so paradoxical. Justice in the form of killing is one thing but who must bear the emotional toll of carrying out the execution.
And so it all comes back to Bernadine, or specifically to Woodard, whose performance in “Clemency” emerged for me as the strongest to be featured at TIFF this year. Thirty-six years ago, Woodard made a splash in Hollywood as a vivid young woman in “Cross Creek”. It was a marvellous turn and cemented her talent, earning her only Oscar nomination. She has been more successful on television in a string of TV movies and guest appearances, racking up 18 Emmy nominations (with four wins) over the years. Woodard’s appearance in a project has always meant a committed performance, and considering the searing precision of her work in “Clemency,” one imagines that the rallying cry around her work would be louder if she were a white actress with the same abilities.
In 2013, Woodard was asked to weigh in on Lupita Nyong’o, her co-star in “12 Years a Slave”. Pundits were interested in whether Nyong’o was getting the roles she deserved after her big-screen success in that film. Woodard offered this bit of wisdom: “You know when we’ll know that things have changed? You know that brilliant, stunningly beautiful, and poised Lupita Nyong’o? 12 Years a Slave is an incredible launch of a career … We’ll see the trajectory of her path and what she’s offered after that. Then we’ll know whether things have changed or if Lupita is consigned to playing second banana.” She may very well have been talking of herself. For Woodard still feels underrated, a brilliant actress with a string of second-banana or third-banana roles in feature films. “Clemency” changes that narrative. Finally, at 66, she is front and centre on the big screen.
One cannot watch “Clemency” and ignore the profundity of the work being presented on screen, and what’s great about Woodard’s work here is that it comes in a film that supports her at every turn. Aldis Hodge and Danielle Brooks, in particular, offer two excellent supporting performances, complementing Chukwu’s interest in the difficult parts of human interaction. The trust that Chukwu has for Woodard is supreme so the film ends with laser-sharp focus on her face. Faces are, at its root, what the cinema has always been about. Woodard’s expressive face, and teary eyes at the films end surpass any special effect. You dare not look away.
