Clemency Parent Guide

“You can’t know what it’s like to look at these people every day….I am alone. And nobody can fix it.” So says Bernadine Williams (Alfred Woodard), warden of a prison where those sentenced to death are killed by lethal injection. When the execution of Victor Jimenez (Alex Castillo) goes badly wrong, Bernadine and other corrections officers struggle to deal with the fallout.

Clemency is not a film that rants about the need to abolish capital punishment. It doesn’t need to. Instead of relying on impassioned speeches about barbarism and cruelty, Clemency simply brings audiences into the life of Warden Williams, her employees, condemned prisoners, and the other people whose lives are affected by the death penalty.

The film begins with one of the most horrifying scenes I have ever watched on the big screen. In what feels like real time, the camera follows Jimenez into the execution chamber and watches as he’s strapped onto the gurney. The paramedic, in a grotesque parody of medical care, tries to insert an IV in his arm. Then his foot. And finally, his groin. With the movie’s tension pulling ever tighter, the drugs are then administered, only for Jimenez to start choking and convulsing. The staff quickly close the curtain so the witnesses don’t see what happens, but the camera keeps us in the room until Jimenez is dead.

Warden Williams reacts with brisk efficiency, making the appropriate notifications and dealing with the public relations problems. But the botched execution ramps up the strain on her professional persona, and it begins to crack. She spends time in a bar after work, on one occasion becoming so intoxicated that her deputy warden has to talk her out of driving home. And her marriage is fraying. Her husband Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) sees the erosion of her inner self and perceptively observes, “I don’t think you want to live in fragments anymore. I think you want to be whole.”

Alfre Woodard’s portrayal of Bernadine Williams is already being rightly touted as a contender for the Best Actress Oscar and it would be well deserved. The story of this film emerges as Williams’ emotions, repressed as they are by her professional mask, play across Woodard’s face. Her face - taut and shadowed during Jimenez’s execution; defensive and exhausted arguing with her husband; bland and bureaucratic as she tells a prisoner about his upcoming execution and makes suggestions for his final meal; and fragmenting in silent horror at the end – is the canvas where the wider cost of capital punishment is painfully reckoned.

Clemency is a hard film to watch because it forces us to ask ourselves excruciatingly difficult questions about justice, law, dignity, and humanity. Is the death penalty the most effective way to deal with the most horrific crimes? Does the state have the right to kill? Can capital punishment be permissible when there is even a remote possibility of wrongful conviction? Does the death penalty needlessly end lives of convicts who have experienced genuine remorse and reformation? If the state is going to execute offenders, is it obligated to do so humanely? Does the desire of victims for closure give the state the right to demand its employees kill? And, who needs clemency: the convicted or their executioners?

The weighty issues that underpin this movie mean it’s clearly unsuitable for young viewers. Clemency has an R rating, but the profanity is relatively minor (aside from three sexual expletives), the sexual activity is between a married couple and doesn’t involve nudity, and the alcohol use is portrayed negatively. The real issue here is violence, which is mostly bloodless and is carried out by the well oiled bureaucratic machinery of the state. This will certainly scare adults more than any monster flick, but it gives mature teens and their parents plenty to talk about.