THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG
Directed by Lawrence Schiller
Written by Norman Mailer
Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Christine Lahti, Rosanna Arquette
Directed by Lawrence Schiller
Written by Norman Mailer
Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Christine Lahti, Rosanna Arquette
Here is a little secret that filmmakers know: Every movie contains a moral center. The moral center is the person or thing to whom the audience looks for the established and proper psychological response to what is happening. In an essentially simple police drama, for instance, the officer of the law represents the moral center while the unrepentant criminal gives the moral center something to be offended by. In slightly more complex configurations, the criminal may indeed be the moral center, as in The Story of Robin Hood, where it is the Sheriff of Nottingham, the keeper of order, who portrays evil while Robin Hood, the thief, is the person we look to for reassurance. Far more complex is the use of the anti-hero, as one finds in the character of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, where the hoodlum narrates the tale and posits his behavior as morally superior to those of the manipulative society at large. A similar device is used by Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers, where the serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox are ultimately shown to be better than the society that celebrates their criminality. On some occasions, the moral center is simply ridiculous, or may be satirized, or may only be developed throughout the motion picture. Tragedies, comedies, historical works, even documentaries utilize this moral center. Sometimes the camera itself should be credited with the role.
In the important movie The Executioner's Song (1982), Christine Lahti works her brains out to be that moral center for us. As Brenda Nicol, a cousin to the man who would reverse ten years of societal abstinence from the horrors of capital punishment in the United States, Lahti strains with every scene to be that thing that producer-director Lawrence Schiller tries valiantly to resist: giving this film the energy to lift itself up out of the gutter. Tommy Lee Jones, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, does his damnedest to foil the core--that is, after all, his job. He does not in any way disappoint. A mere two years after appearing as Doolittle in Coal Miner's Daughter, Jones recreated himself with a conviction, so to speak, that would have taken lesser men lifetimes to master.
Jones avoids going for cheap sentiment. We feel no particular sympathy for Gilmore and that's appropriate. We feel no particular sympathy for his two murder victims and--depending on where the film leads--that might get away with being appropriate. So let's turn to Gilmore's acquaintances. Surely there will be some sympathy worked out there. We meet the frequently naked and fascinating Rosanna Arquette, who plays the love interest, a nineteen year-old confusion case stacked against Gilmore's naive misanthropy. But, no, she doesn't give us any moral compunctions one way or the other, one minute loving the killer and the next schtupping guys while he rots in jail. Even when she tries to kill herself so that she may join Gary in the afterlife--at Gilmore's urging--we feel an exhausted sense of pity, but not a flicker of sympathy.
Okay, then it must be Eli Wallach, that lovable and totally dependable old stand-by who plays Uncle Vern. Surely his world view will give us something to grip! Nope. Not a thing. One minute he's calmly warning Gary to keep his hands off the granddaughter and the next he's saying, "Oh well, the kid could never mend shoes worth a damn."
Without doubt the moral center or core, to the extent that Schiller allows it to exist at all, comes from Christine Lahti. But the director, who seems to have learned his trade from working Quinn Martin productions in the lazy days of police dramas, cannot be bothered to jazz up the Norman Mailer screenplay because, gosh oh whiz, Mailer did after all win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (which was a lot more interesting) and no one could dare stand up to The Man Himself, now could they? Well, it's clear that Schiller couldn't. Time after time we keep expecting Gilmore to make us cringe or weep or maybe even laugh. Time after time we are disappointed, the only relief being when Lahti finally casts some tired judgment on her cousin and calls him a shithead, which he apparently was.
Gilmore, convicted of two murders, was sentenced to death. He opted to face a firing squad. His attorney appealed the sentence and Gilmore dismissed him. The ACLU appealed the sentence. At last the Supreme Court ruled that Gilmore had the right to be executed according to due process. He was shot to death on January 17, 1977. That execution was the first in U.S. history since Luis Monge was killed in June 1967.
As of January 1, 2012, 1277 convicted murderers have been put to death in this country. Three of those have been by firing squad. Those three were in Utah. Gilmore was the first.
477 of those executions have been in Texas.
There were no executions at all in 1978. Then in 1984 the government killed twenty-one prisoners. By 1993 the number of executions had risen to thirty-eight, perhaps demonstrating that both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations like the taste of blood. By 1997 we were up to seventy-four executions. Gilmore's corneas were transplanted into two different people following the execution.
The above information might have been the moral core of a film about Gilmore. It was not.
Schiller does his best to restrain Lahti from reflecting, much less inspiring, societal values here. To the extent that she managed to defy those attempts sings hosannas to her own talents as an actor.
In the important movie The Executioner's Song (1982), Christine Lahti works her brains out to be that moral center for us. As Brenda Nicol, a cousin to the man who would reverse ten years of societal abstinence from the horrors of capital punishment in the United States, Lahti strains with every scene to be that thing that producer-director Lawrence Schiller tries valiantly to resist: giving this film the energy to lift itself up out of the gutter. Tommy Lee Jones, as convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, does his damnedest to foil the core--that is, after all, his job. He does not in any way disappoint. A mere two years after appearing as Doolittle in Coal Miner's Daughter, Jones recreated himself with a conviction, so to speak, that would have taken lesser men lifetimes to master.
Jones avoids going for cheap sentiment. We feel no particular sympathy for Gilmore and that's appropriate. We feel no particular sympathy for his two murder victims and--depending on where the film leads--that might get away with being appropriate. So let's turn to Gilmore's acquaintances. Surely there will be some sympathy worked out there. We meet the frequently naked and fascinating Rosanna Arquette, who plays the love interest, a nineteen year-old confusion case stacked against Gilmore's naive misanthropy. But, no, she doesn't give us any moral compunctions one way or the other, one minute loving the killer and the next schtupping guys while he rots in jail. Even when she tries to kill herself so that she may join Gary in the afterlife--at Gilmore's urging--we feel an exhausted sense of pity, but not a flicker of sympathy.
Okay, then it must be Eli Wallach, that lovable and totally dependable old stand-by who plays Uncle Vern. Surely his world view will give us something to grip! Nope. Not a thing. One minute he's calmly warning Gary to keep his hands off the granddaughter and the next he's saying, "Oh well, the kid could never mend shoes worth a damn."
Without doubt the moral center or core, to the extent that Schiller allows it to exist at all, comes from Christine Lahti. But the director, who seems to have learned his trade from working Quinn Martin productions in the lazy days of police dramas, cannot be bothered to jazz up the Norman Mailer screenplay because, gosh oh whiz, Mailer did after all win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel (which was a lot more interesting) and no one could dare stand up to The Man Himself, now could they? Well, it's clear that Schiller couldn't. Time after time we keep expecting Gilmore to make us cringe or weep or maybe even laugh. Time after time we are disappointed, the only relief being when Lahti finally casts some tired judgment on her cousin and calls him a shithead, which he apparently was.
Gilmore, convicted of two murders, was sentenced to death. He opted to face a firing squad. His attorney appealed the sentence and Gilmore dismissed him. The ACLU appealed the sentence. At last the Supreme Court ruled that Gilmore had the right to be executed according to due process. He was shot to death on January 17, 1977. That execution was the first in U.S. history since Luis Monge was killed in June 1967.
As of January 1, 2012, 1277 convicted murderers have been put to death in this country. Three of those have been by firing squad. Those three were in Utah. Gilmore was the first.
477 of those executions have been in Texas.
There were no executions at all in 1978. Then in 1984 the government killed twenty-one prisoners. By 1993 the number of executions had risen to thirty-eight, perhaps demonstrating that both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations like the taste of blood. By 1997 we were up to seventy-four executions. Gilmore's corneas were transplanted into two different people following the execution.
The above information might have been the moral core of a film about Gilmore. It was not.
Schiller does his best to restrain Lahti from reflecting, much less inspiring, societal values here. To the extent that she managed to defy those attempts sings hosannas to her own talents as an actor.
