THE EXECUTIONEE'S SONG

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF DEAD MAN Walking is quite a simple one: at its end you don't know where Tim Robbins, its writer-director, stands on the issue of capital punishment. Considering that there is no more tendentious topic available to a filmmaker, Robbins' restraint, his determination to explore the moral and psychological nuances of the relationship that develops between Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), a man condemned to death for his participation in a heinous crime, and Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), who becomes his spiritual counselor in his final months, is exemplary.

And in a way surprising, since Robbins and Sarandon, a real-life couple, are not known for their shyness in expressing outraged opinions on controversial subjects. Here, however, working from a free adaptation of an autobiographical book by Sister Prejean, they have chosen to pursue a matter too subtle for sloganeering: the faint possibility that evil and goodness can find a way of speaking to one another, the dim hope that the former can be in some sense redeemed, the latter in some sense educated.

Cases don't come any harder than Poncelet's. His drifting life reaches its nadir when, with another man, he commits a lovers' lane rape and double murder, steadfastly (and unpersuasively) insisting that he did not commit the killings. There is about him an inchoate rage tempered, if that's the word we want, by self-pity and a certain raw intelligence, which has led him to jailhouse lawyering and several stays of execution. It is largely the latter quality, and the challenging seductiveness of his manner, that leads Sister Helen to see in him the possibilities of redemption.

Cases don't come any gentler than hers. She is a woman of solid middle-class background. If anything, she has been more mysteriously called to a life caring for the marginal than Poncelet has been to his life of darkness. All we really know about her is that her moral courage is matched by her moral acuity. She opens herself up not just to the condemned man but also to the families of his victims, thereby squaring the movie's moral drama. Whatever she may think about the brutal finality of capital punishment, she cannot deny the anguish of these victims, the brutal finalities that a terrible crime has imposed on them.

Sister Helen can find only limited possibilities for mercy in this situation. Perhaps if Poncelet can be persuaded to admit his full complicity in the crime, he will find some peace, some honor, in his final moments. Perhaps if he does so, the victims' families will find a closure more consoling than revenge.

It is a measure of this movie's integrity that it offers no reprieve more melodramatically satisfying than this. It is a measure of its complexity--and of the forces Penn and Sarandon have held in reserve during their hypnotic struggle for his soul--that its final moments leave us awash in emotion. How hard it is to achieve even modest states of grace in this world. How patiently we must work to achieve them. How easy, absent a Sister Helen, it is to miss them entirely.