Last Dance
Alleva, Richard
Richard Alleva DEAD WOMAN STUMBLES Beresford's 'Last Dance Uere is a sentence I wanted to write about Last Dance, the new Sharon Stone movie about capital punishment: "Though wiseacres call it...
...But couldn't the artist who gave us Breaker Morant have dispensed with the scene in which Stone's fellow prisoners clatter their mugs in sympathy for her as she heads for Death Row...
...Well, we do learn that Stone murdered the son of a rich man with political connections, thus predisposing the state to severity...
...Last Dance is rather well acted, moves right along, and most viewers will find it digestible...
...Cornball examples like I Want to Live tell us that capital punishment is wrong because innocent people sometimes get executed...
...Finally, Stone's suffering and death seem to exist so that Morrow can prove himself a sensitive and caring guy...
...But the Morrow-Stone encounters are bland, beginning in predictable hostility and ending with equally predictable hand-holding and tears...
...A fascinating background story is kept so far in the background that we squint to make it out and never really do understand it...
...Antipunishment movies should always be worst-case scenarios...
...The interaction between what the nun learned of Matthew face-to-face and what she found of the devastation his evil had created opened up vistas for us: into the hearts of the victims, into the murk of the criminal mind, into the perhaps insurmountable difficulty the justice system faces in trying to punish evil...
...Nothing epitomizes this movie's failure so sharply as the scene in which Stone bids farewell to her younger brother just before her execution...
...It knotted my guts and knotted they stay whenever I recall that powerful work...
...Last Dance seems to say that executing the Sharon Stone character is wrong because she has educated herself in prison to the point where she is virtually a different person...
...But who is she...
...But why should a film about capital punishment be digestible...
...Clearly, Beresford remains in control of his craft...
...The scene was devastating in its truthfulness...
...Matthew Poncelet welcomes his mother and brothers...
...What the movie becomes more and more about is Morrow's need to slough off his rich boy's lifestyle and refute his older and more successful brother...
...But even better performances couldn't have prevailed against the texturelessness, the parade-ground schematicism of the writing...
...Certainly: that politicians value votes above individual lives, that lawyers groan under their case loads, that the parents of murdered children are often in favor of capital punishment, that accomplices to crime may shift the burden of guilt onto their partners...
...Even worse, through crosscutting the bustle of the scenes outside prison sometimes obliterates whatever power the intimate scenes might have had...
...Then, a lap-dissolve indicates that time has elapsed and, though this is their last chance to speak to each other, these naturally ineloquent people simply have nothing more to say...
...So, shall we do away with imprisonment because the innocent sometimes serve time...
...But do Morrow's adventures outside the prison at least tell us something about the justice system...
...Five months after viewing the Tim Robbins film, I'm still sorting out my impressions...
...If we find capital punishment wrong for the Matthew Poncelets, then we are truly against capital punishment...
...And who was she...
...there was an element of class warfare in her crime...
...What's actually on screen...
...Dead Man Walking is art...
...Did you...
...Gee, I didn't know any of that...
...After a few exchanges, Stone begins to warn her sibling to go straight, and then...cut to Rob Morrow knocking on more official doors, petitioning judges, whatever...
...Alas, working from a dishonest and diffuse script by Ron Koslow, Beresford has directed only smoothly, even slickly, and who wants smoothness and slick-ness from a great director...
...Her hysterical outburst near the end is light-years beyond her overrated, actressy pyrotechnics in Casino...
...He does do some very good work with actors (particularly Stone and the superb Randy Quaid with his expressively lumbering body), and the film's final quarter-hour, in which a last-minute stay-of-execution only prolongs the torture of capital punishment, is very tense and veracious...
...Dead Man Walking wasn't...
...But there the shot was and, looking at it, I felt I was watching Robert Frost desperately trying to turn into Edgar Guest...
...The prison interviews don't adduce even an interesting enigma...
...Their hearts are open and their mouths are closed...
...Here was the moment when we should have been allowed to look into the heart of the woman as she laid it bare to the only person on earth she loved, a boy already slipping into the sort of criminal habits that destroyed her...
...Remember the equivalent scenes in Dead Man Walking...
...As in Dead Man, the scenes between the leading players are meant to plumb the depths of rage, resentment, and repentance, while the investigation gives us a panoramic view of crime and punishment...
...The protagonist of Last Dance is Rick Hayes (Rob Morrow), a well-educated ne'er-do-well who has landed a state job arranging clemency hearings for prisoners on death row...
...and she was even, in a sense, avenging the sexual exploitation of her mother...
...What was the nature of her criminality...
...There is a cinematic restlessness here that bespeaks insensitivity...
...Well, maybe she should have been executed sooner, before she had a chance to improve...
...their exchanges are warm, funny, somewhat barbed, and always revealing of Matthew's background and character...
...Morrow is charming for about fifteen minutes and then you start to wonder why the director didn't cast someone whom you would want to watch for more than fifteen minutes...
...I hopefully composed it before seeing Last Dance because its director, Bruce Beres-ford, made three of my favorite films- Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies, Black Robe-and I knew that if he had created an honest work about capital punishment it would be a masterpiece...
...But all these potential revelations remain ghostly semirevel-ations...
...I know you're not that person [that is, a murderer] anymore," Morrow reassures Stone...
...The maker of the cliche-free Tender Mercies should have been the last director on earth to give us, in a prison movie, a shot of a robin siting on the jail's barbed-wire fence...
...Like Sister Helen, Rick becomes intimate with a murderer (Sharon Stone) and, like the nun, he does plenty of interviewing: officials, witnesses, survivors of the victims, an accomplice of Stone, lawyers, judges...
...Richard Alleva DEAD WOMAN STUMBLES Beresford's 'Last Dance Uere is a sentence I wanted to write about Last Dance, the new Sharon Stone movie about capital punishment: "Though wiseacres call it Dead Woman Walking, this film has a character all its own/' But I can't write that sentence...
...But there are more fascinating details that are merely dangled before us: Stone knew one of her two victims in childhood...
...Last Dance is pablum...
...It is Dead Man Walking's honesty to give us a murderer who is so warped that half a lifetime in prison with psychological therapy wouldn't necessarily have straightened him out...
...It would be nice to report that Beres-ford's direction transcends the script, but it seemed to me that his staging accommodated itself to the sterile slickness of the writing...
...I found this distasteful...
...Stone is good, inhabiting her role with an ease that makes you imagine the character's past...
...One of the triumphs of the Robbins work is the way it balances Sister Helen Prejean's encounters with the condemned prisoner Matthew Poncelet with her experiences outside the prison as she worked for the abrogation of the death sentence while striving to comprehend the rage and grief of the murder victims' survivors...
Vol. 123 • June 1996 • No. 12
