Review: Werner Herzog’s ‘On Death Row’

Unlike many a modern filmmaker, compelled to excavate the intimate and even mundane for life’s meaning, German director Werner Herzog believes in extremes. During his impressively prolific career, he has consistently sought out the outcasts and the heroes, the misfits and prophets, the dreamers of fevered and spectacular dreams. The subjects of his 25 feature-length documentaries include a deaf and blind woman, a freestyle mountain climber, the lone survivor of an airplane crash and a man who lived with grizzlies. Indeed, within Herzog’s remarkable canon, a multi-platform documentary about death row inmates seems almost mainstream.

Herzog interviewed half a dozen death row inmates for his film “Into the Abyss,” which premiered last year. After choosing to focus on just one, Herzog decided to use the others for a “companion” television series. The four-episode “On Death Row” premieres on Investigation Discovery on Friday; George Rivas, one of two men featured in the third episode, was put to death last month.

Herzog almost immediately identifies himself as being “respectfully” against the death penalty, which is legal in 34 states, but what follows in the first episode is much more contemplative than proselytizing. In 1998, James Barnes was convicted of strangling his ex-wife; it wasn’t until he confessed, after his conversion to Islam, to molesting and murdering another woman that he was put on death row.

As his execution draws nearer, Barnes has dropped hints that he has committed at least two other murders, which he finally begins to detail. These confessions are seen by some, says Herzog, as Barnes’ final attempt to extend his own life; Barnes says he is simply offering the victims’ families closure.

During the interviews, Barnes is well-spoken yet strangely detached, acknowledging his actions and his subsequent remorse in tones that suggest they were the experiences of another person. Even the news that Herzog has managed to contact Barnes’ long-estranged father is greeted with a disturbingly placid mien.

They are chilling scenes to watch, the evenness of the conversation underscoring the horror of the crimes; at no point does Barnes offer any explanation for his behavior. Interviews with lawyers involved in the case, and especially Barnes’ twin sister, offer grim counterpoint — Barnes showed sociopathic tendencies from childhood, but clearly he was also the victim of tremendous paternal abuse, including “blanket parties” in which all the members of the family were forced to whip him bloody.

This brief glimpse into the roiling crucible of one American family is somehow more disturbing than the crimes or the idea of state-sanctioned death, if only because it poses an even more complicated problem: If monsters are made, not born, how do we, as a society, prevent their creation?

This is not a question Herzog himself raises, but his style of filmmaking — to obsessively explore his subject from as many points of entry as possible — is the cinematic definition of thought-provoking.

Still, “On Death Row” is more snapshot than portrait — we are given limited exposure to people whose actions put them outside the spectrum of acceptable levels of humanity and then, though nudged to acknowledge that humanity, left to form our own opinions. Which, as far as the death penalty goes, are probably not terribly different than the ones with which we began.

But as Herzog has proved time and again, there is always value in hearing another person’s story, and the lives lived beyond the pale inevitably stir feelings deep and primal enough to set us to questioning our own.

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com