Into the Abyss

Filmmaker Werner Herzog does a documentary about Michael James Perry. He's on death row in Livingston, Texas scheduled to be executed in 8 days. He was convicted along with his friend Jason Burkett for a triple homicide. They killed a housewife in her home to steal a car and then killed two young people to get passcode for the community gate. This is not really a whodunit unless you believe Burkett or even Perry. It's not impossible to believe them and there are certainly people willing to do that. This is really about the whole society in general. It is about the victims. It is about the daughter who lost her family. It is about Burkett's father who watches his various family members get incarcerated along with him. It is about the friend and Herzog who is more interested in him learning to read as an adult. It is about the executioner who had to quit. This is quite a tapestry of Texan life.

Herzog's work may lend itself to interpretation more than most. And while it may just be a quibble of emphasis, I would not, as the other two reviewers here have, say this is essentially a documentary about 'capital punishment'. Just as I would not say "grizzly man" was really a documentary about bear attacks. Herzog lets it be known he doesn't approve of the death penalty, but mostly, like most Herzog documentaries, this just struck me as a portrait of (as another reviewer put it well) the "ill-fated".

Certainly, if you go into this thinking you're going to get Michael Moore style anti-death penalty agitprop, you're going to be disappointed. This is a series of interviews with a Texas death row inmate scheduled for imminent execution (an inmate Herzog has characterized in interviews as a "truly frightening" human being) and the lives of some of those either the case, or the Texas Death Penalty system generally, have touched upon. It is probably the least sensationalistic account of its sort put on film. And for that alone, Herzog deserves praise.

Having lived in Houston for many years and knowing this area just north of it pretty well, I can say Herzog is able convey a lot about the area and its people, through the lens of this horrific act, very well.

Well, once more, what is it about, if not capital punishment.... I think Herzog in a related context (his "On Death Row" documentary series) may have put it best when an attorney he was interviewing noted 'we all have a need to humanize' and rationalize these people who have done terrible things, and Herzog stopped them to say "I don't humanize them. I don't want to humanize. They simply are human beings". And that's kind of how I saw 'into the abyss'. It's not an attempt to rationalize or humanize a triple-murderer, nor is it an attempt rationalize, demonize, or humanize state sanctioned execution. It's just portrait of a piece of life as it is now lived.

You know and value Herzog because he's one of few these days who can offer a glimpse of cosmologic infrastructure. The wheels and chains that move the world beneath the stories we make up to describe it. What he does, is that he frames chaotic nature where it has a story to tell - say a man living with bears, or an island about to explode - builds this as opera while maintaining the illusion of spontaneous life, blurring document with fiction, then uses this to bring to the surface an image that explains the madness of those stories. A boat being tugged over a hill, as pure as this.

The story here is about death-row inmates awaiting execution in a Texas penitentiary, structured so that we absorn not just the heinous, meaningless crime but the broader world that leads up to it, allows it to happen, is dependent on and reflects it. Broken homes, unemployment, casual street violence, Herzog provides enough background detail to ground this in a larger systemic failure: so-called civilized society as only a facade of chaotic nature left to seed.

As with Caves the previous year, the film is talky, dependent on people being able to conjure an experience we only have a handful of images for; the crime scene, dried blood still spattered on the walls, the quietly ominous-looking execution chamber, the prison cemetery lined with crosses of the executed.

And this is the whole point. Here is a story of immense, sobering power, interviewing a man who will be dead by Monday, but of course Herzog cannot film the moment, much to the chagrin of many. He has to tell a story around it.

No, the point is that we only have words, memories, stories to say. Many of these are recounted in the film. The execution itself is pieced together from objects and testimonies, very much like we would process a memory. But these stories are still powerful enough to decide life and death. Two were convicted for the crime, and going beyond who pulled the trigger, since both planned for it, only one was sentenced to die.

This is what is so sobering to me; one man just had a better story to tell the court, more touching drama to explain his being, and we get to note this in the film for a clear effect, he's just more agreeable to listen to, appears more responsible, more level-headed and contrite, whereas the other is just a little wacky. Asked about a story, he blurts out something about monkeys and camp. Herzog himself is markedly disinterested in him, whereas a lot of time is devoted to the man who isn't going to die, a long soliloquy by his guilt-wracked father - serving life in the same prison - that we presume is as sentimental as he pled to the court with it.

The bitter, hard-to-swallow truth is that this guy's life is simply better movie material, makes for a better story, and this decides life - notice too his wife's sappy story about their first encounter, misty-eyed soap as it is.

So even though the film seems more streamlined and ordinary for Herzog, talky opposed to visually primal, it is as pure as he ever delivered, perhaps without himself knowing it.

The whole system we have devised to support life, call it state, society, civilization, is not an infallible, impartial machine but hinges on the bias of storytelling and emotion. The law is arbitrary, equally chaotic as what is meant to organize. At the bottom of that, there is only time and emptiness.

Observant Herzog fans will note that he used this intertitle - 'Time and Emptiness' - for the closing segment of his Buddhist documentary Wheel of Time. See if you can spot the powerful connection between these two, the floating worlds and ritual they portray.

In September 2011, two events reignited the death-penalty debate in America.

The first came on the seventh of the month at the Republican Presidential Debates in Simi Valley, California. Texas governor Rick Perry was asked by an NBC News correspondent whether he was able to sleep at night, given that his state had executed 234 inmates during his time in office. Before the question was even finished, the audience broke into rapturous applause, cheering the body count.

Two weeks later came the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, who had spent 20 years protesting his innocence on death row for killing a security guard in a parking-lot altercation. Nine former witnesses signed affidavits retracting their original statements and claiming they had been coerced by police into identifying Davis. However, in spite of this, and significant pressure from an array of human-rights groups, the Supreme Court refused to overturn Davis's death sentence.

Coincidentally, German filmmaker Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life premiered at the Toronto film festival in the weeks between the Californian GOP debate and Davis's execution. The documentary focuses on three murders that took place in a rural Texas town in 2001, for which Jason Burkett and Michael Perry received a life sentence and the death penalty respectively. Due to the film's timeliness, it was rushed for a November release and has now landed on UK screens. Yet while Herzog enters the film making no bones about his opposition to capital punishment, he refuses to exploit his tentative subject for his own political purposes.

From the outset, Herzog has clearly gone to great lengths to avoid the sort of manipulative didacticism popularised by Michael Moore that has blighted mainstream documentary for the past decade. Whereas he might have chosen to focus on cases of questionable guilt in order to make his case, Herzog opts for a series of murders which are straightforward and frighteningly trivial in their motivations. Both Perry and Burkett continue to place blame on each other, but according to a local cop, who talks us through the case in the film's opening minutes, the two young men killed a middle-aged mother and two teenage boys, all in order to steal the woman's red convertible. Interviewing Perry days before his execution, the victim's families and the state officials involved in the lethal injections that take place in Texas - an average of around two per month since 2001 - the film offers a sombre meditation on the barbarism which survives in modern civilised society.

Yet there remains in many of these interviews an aching humanity achieved through the plain spectacle of real people talking about deeply affecting moments in their lives. Their candour brings a distinctly life-affirming quality to film, which Herzog comes dangerously close to ruining by his recurring need to put words into the mouths of his subjects.

With his last project, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which explored the Chauvet caves and the ancient pre-historic paintings that adorn their walls, Herzog was free to rhapsodise as much as he liked. He brings a similar compulsion to impose his own poetic meaning onto the images to Into the Abyss. During one of the film's most heartrending interviews, in which a former state executioner explains the moment he realised he couldn't continue, Herzog asks 'Was this the first time when you felt like yourself?'. Needless to say, the interviewee looks rather nonplussed. In moments like this, Herzog comes across like an aloof auteur shamelessly attempting to envelop his subjects into his own poignant conception of events.

While he abstains from narration and never strays from behind the camera, his unmistakable low drawl is a constant and manipulative presence. Similarly his carving of the film into chapters, complete with such melodramatic titles as 'Time and Emptiness', feels like a needless framework that only compromises the manifold beauty of the film.

With Into the Abyss, Herzog stays true to his word and doesn't allow partisan fingerwagging to distance us from the horror of capital punishment. Unfortunately, his heavy-handed poeticising has much the same effect, interrupting the flow of what is an otherwise gripping and unassuming conversation about the shadowy border between justice and revenge, and the inimitable value of human life.

Another reviewer wrote that Herzog is dancing around the subject. This sentence alone describes one of the major problems of the documentary for me. Herzog who interviews all involved (from family members, to the inmates), does not poke enough when it comes to the criminals itself. While I'm not sure about the death penalty itself (and the most haunting and therefor best moments of the movie come from the interview with an ex prison warden), it would be interesting to really get behind and inside the head of the "subjects".

Still the documentary is more than well done, with Herzog being involved a lot (which means if you don't like him, you will have a problem with the movie) and quite a few interesting bits. Herzog lets both parties say their peace and the viewer has to decide, what he/she thinks is right or wrong themselves.