Live your dash

Into the Abyss

(2011)

Readers as obsessive as I (so this will be a test of your level of obsessiveness: if both elements apply, seek help immediately) will (1) notice that I'm departing from my usual Friday night deaccession project, wherein I see whether I can clear from my DVD shelves or my DVR hard drive a film that has been sitting there unwatched for a long time and (2) recall that I intended to see this film but was thwarted on a Manhattan trip not long ago. The explanation for (1) is that I want to get this Netflix disc in the mail tomorrow, in hopes that it will get to Hartford on Monday and that the Very Long Wait currently on the board for the first disc of the just-released second season of Treme will magically morph into immediate availability so that I can start watching it on Tuesday. Maybe I'll deaccession later in the weekend, maybe not.

So, the film. As with every crime-and-capital punishment documentary, we meet the convicted killers, we meet the victims' survivors, we meet a law-enforcement agent involved with the investigation, we meet a man who handled 120-odd condemned prisoners in their final hours, we even meet the wife of one of the convicts, who came to know him through assisting in his legal representation and fell in love before meeting him face to face.

But because it's a Werner Herzog documentary, it's completely unlike, and maybe better than, any we've ever seen before on the subject, though I'm not sure I can really say why. In part, it's that, as always, he brings himself, with the quirkily perfect questions that an irrepressibly curious nine-year-old might ask, into the film. In part, it's that even though both convicted killers claim innocence, he doesn't really seem to care much about that angle.

He wants us to see everything we can see--including police-investigation video of the home in which one of the murders was committed, complete with poorly concealed pools of blood and spatters on the walls--and he wants you to hear the story from every possible human angle. The film is subtitled A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, and where Joe Friday might insist on "just the facts," Herzog's interest lies in exactly the opposite direction: just the perceptions, ma'am. The result is that we're immersed in the multiangled story and we care for everyone in it, and mistrust everyone as well. An astonishing achievement.