On Crime and Revenge of the People : Tim Robbins’ Newest Film Looks at the Death Penalty

The title is probably a tip-off, but “Dead Man Walking” is not the feel-good movie of the year. With deliberate anti-sensationalism, it peels back the day-to-day details and day-to-doom emotions of a death row inmate and the nun who becomes his state-supplied spiritual advisor. And unlike “Murder in the First,” the condemned man doesn’t get a hooker in his cell.

“Helen’s biggest fear was that I’d write some scene where she’d smuggle in a cyanide capsule in her bra,” recounts actor Tim Robbins, who directed the film and adapted it from the nonfiction book by Sister Helen Prejean, the Louisiana nun whose death row work inspired the movie’s fictionalized events.

That doesn’t happen. There are also no tunnels dug out with spoons, or files baked in cakes, or even Frankenstein-gothic prison architecture--the real-life location, the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, looks more like high school than hell. Sean Penn plays the fictional convict Matthew Poncelet, who helped to rape and murder a young couple; Susan Sarandon portrays Sister Helen with fleshed-out foibles and doubts that never degenerate into actorly tics.

Yet though outwardly muted, with well-observed discount-store fashions and furniture in its unromantic milieu, the film uses precision-placed flashbacks and other dramatic devices to try to manipulate audiences into a revenge mode. That’s legitimate, of course--”Dirty Harry,” “Death Wish” and many other films do the same thing in artfully crafted, viscerally cathartic ways--yet Robbins doesn’t own up to it.

“I think a great story doesn’t have a point of view,” he contends, either defensively or in defiance of virtually all western thought about literature. “A great story deals with the complexities of things and takes you to both sides”--which, despite his contention, isn’t mutually exclusive of a point of view, as evidenced by “Death of a Salesman,” “The Merchant of Venice” and other complex stories with a definite thing to say.

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That issue becomes significant here since “Dead Man Walking” isn’t escapist entertainment like “Money Train” or “GoldenEye.” It’s a movie with something to say. Yet Robbins stammers when trying to say just what he’s trying to say.

“I don’t know, really,” he says, trying to describe his film’s theme. “Thematically, it has to do with violence, with repercussions of violence. It has to do with mothers. It has to do with unconditional love. It has to do with redemption. . . .”

To a dispassionate observer, what it has to do with primarily is society’s desire for revenge. Robbins perks up at that suggestion.

“Part of it is about addressing the capacity in myself for revenge,” he says. “If anyone were ever to mess with anyone in my family, I’m totally capable of violence.”

That’s understandable in the heat of emotion, though a storyteller would be hard-pressed to say heated emotion should be the basis of law. No storyteller is required to be evenhanded, and might well and brilliantly weave a theme that “revenge is good.” Yet Robbins’ insistence that “Dead Man Walking” is evenhanded is rebuffed by his own filmmaking choices.

“There was a scene in the movie that was cut out,” he says, “where Helen visited the [murdered girl’s parents] after the execution, and the father’s telling a story and he breaks down and says, ‘I still wanna see him die!’ The execution didn’t do it for him. Revenge just didn’t do it for him.”

And though Robbins speaks with respect about meeting the actual warden at Angola “who started expressing his doubts, his feelings as a Christian, about having nodded his head the night before, to start [a real-life] execution,” the film leaves out any such ambiguities.

Perhaps Robbins--a likable and gangly 6-foot-5, 37-year-old--is just cautious in an interview about being branded “political.” That’s ironic, considering he wrote and directed the wickedly funny, well-received and remarkably prescient satire of right-wing politicians, “Bob Roberts” (1992). Yet that film was a one-shot deal, whereas “Dead Man Walking” is the first in a multipicture contract with PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, and few fledgling directors, understandably, want to rock boats.

Besides which, Robbins, for all his natural and confident talent as a director, is an actor from childhood. His folk singer father, Gil, moved the family from West Covina to New York City to run the Greenwich Village club the Gaslight, and to became a replacement member of the Highwaymen, beginning a year after the folk group’s 1961 No. 1 hit “Michael” (a.k.a. “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”). The younger Robbins joined the Theater for the New City around age 12. After studying theater at UCLA, he co-founded the Los Angeles stage group the Actors Gang in 1981.

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After appearing in and being dismissed from an unaired sitcom pilot and making his screen debut in the 1983 TV movie “Quarterback Princess,” Robbins went on to critical kudos in “Bull Durham” (1988), “The Player” (1992) and “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994). Based in New York, he lives with companion Sarandon--”my wife,” he says casually--and their two young children, John and Miles.

And certainly, becoming a parent changes many a person’s mind about crime and society.

“I think too often people against the death penalty try to canonize these violent criminals,” he says. His “Dead Man Walking” has no saints.