Clemency Review: Chinonye Chukwu’s Sentiment-Free Look at Institutionalized Murder

One of the banes of social-issues films is the op-ed sentiments that their characters often utter, which can turn a narrative into a trite civics lesson. Refreshingly, writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency distinguishes itself with its silence. It often feels as if the narrative that was meant to drive the film has already happened off screen, and that what we’re witnessing is the funereal aftermath.

This impression is true in a fashion, as Clemency’s protagonist, Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), has resigned herself to a waking nightmare. As the warden of a high-security prison, Bernadine has overseen a dozen executions, and another is about to be carried out, of a young, charismatic convict named Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), who’s been on death row for years. Anthony’s case is shaky: He’s a criminal, but he insists that he didn’t kill a policeman, and evidence verifies his assertions. Yet his appeals continue to be rejected, and a granting of clemency by the governor appears to be his only hope for survival.

That Bernadine, like Anthony, is African-American gives Clemency an uncomfortable edge. In various examinations of the prison system, we’re used to seeing white people as the arbiters of power. The racism of our privatized prison system is irrefutable, and so Bernadine carries the aura of a traitor, and no one in the film is more aware of this irony than Bernadine herself. No character ever voices this idea in the film, because if they did, the spell of this almost ineffable discomfort would be broken, and Clemency would be more routine.

Chukwu implicitly circles this concept. Anthony’s attorney, Marty Lumetta (Richard Schiff), is white, and his arguments with Bernadine about her treatment of her prisoners suggest a role reversal. Bernadine is struggling with her husband, Jonathan (Wendell Pierce), who’s frustrated and heartbroken over her aloofness. In the film’s greatest scene, Jonathan, a teacher, reads the opening passage of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to his class. The moment has many meanings. Most literally, we feel Jonathan’s sense of invisibility to his wife. Also, Ellison’s brilliant writing elucidates the existential suffering of African-Americans, which Bernadine may be aiding, and so Jonathan’s painfully beautiful recitation scans as a protest.

Complicating matters further is the pride Bernadine takes in a job that she hates herself for doing; this is her irreconcilable, profoundly human hell, and Woodard dramatizes it in the smallest of gestures, especially in the shifting of her wide, gorgeously expressive eyes. Bernadine’s eyes betray her stiff physicality and studiously neutral phrasing, especially in the film’s second greatest scene, when Bernadine describes the protocol of execution to Anthony. Hodge offers a daring, starkly original gesture of grief, having Anthony gradually freeze with shock before erupting in a spasmodic quake, his few tears suggesting a kind of emotional constipation—an inability to let it all come forth in the face of unimaginable extremis.

Still, the film wants for a certain liveliness. Chukwu’s sense of silence and penchant for austere framing and writing has a whiff of arthouse self-consciousness. Even with subject matter this bleak, there might be room for playfulness as a counterpoint that would render the bleakness all the more unshakable. Clemency shouldn’t be taken for granted though, as it’s a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia, with a heroine at its center whose anguish is driven by a clash between pride and guilt.