Alfre Woodard is superlative in a lacerating drama that renders the saintly self-regard of many death-row films null and void Follow our countdown of the 50 best films of 2020In any year, there are films that mysteriously don’t seem to click with the awards establishment and don’t get the glittering prizes they deserve, which are showered on far less deserving contenders. Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s lacerating death-row drama Clemency only arrived in the
UK this summer, despite surfacing at the Sundance film festival in January 2019. It should have got
Oscars, but didn’t, a distinction it shares with many brilliant films. Alfre Woodard gives a magnificent performance as Bernadine Williams, a US
prison warden who has presided with icy professionalism over a great many executions. But when one of the lethal injections goes terribly wrong, the needle snapping and the prisoner dying in agony, it brings Bernadine to the point of an emotional breakdown. It is as if she herself has been absorbing the poison, drop by drop: her workplace hazard has been corruption of the soul and a hollowing-out of the identity. Now she must face the grisly theatre of a new execution – her 13th – and she is ready to snap.Woodard’s performance conveys the terrible burden, something like a Shakespearean monarch who finds that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Bernadine is a kind of monarch or figurehead: she does not have the power to condemn, nor even to reprieve, though she can make recommendations to the parole board. She is just the face of what goes on, a modern, business suit-wearing technocrat who has to make everything look plausible and efficient. She must deal with the public, with the media, with her staff, with the prisoners’ devastated relatives and their legal representatives, and with the prisoners themselves.