Angel on Death Row

Am I the only one who finds it more than a bit strange and disconcerting that a documentary would use a major Hollywood motion picture as the primary catalyst for a discussion of a volatile and important real-life social issue? (Or am I just getting curmudgeonly and media-jaded?) Angel on Death Row is largely a profile of Sister Helen Prejean, the 57-year-old nun who served as the real-life model for Susan Sarandon's hagiographic role in Dead Man Walking. The video describes the chance beginnings of Prejean's involvement with death row inmates; her role as "spiritual advisor" to killers Patrick Sonnier and Willie Lee Smith (models for Matthew Poncelet, the Sean Penn character in DMW), and three other condemned inmates; and her increasingly intense and vocal commitment to ending capital punishment. Parallel to Prejean's story--a sobering foil to her passionate and eloquently-expressed views--are the descriptions of the horrors suffered by the victims and the families of victims of Sonnier and Smith--gut wrenching and profoundly disturbing stuff. Debbie Morris, one of the two survivors of Smith's various homicidal rampages, is particularly moving in bearing witness. While her eventual confrontation with Prejean is affecting, it is again somehow unsettling that the primary impetus for Morris' reassessment of her feelings about capital punishment seems to have been seeing the movie version of her nightmare. In the end, Angel on Death Row provides precious little in the way of useful insight or in-depth arguments on either side of the capital punishment issue. It's a treatment of the topic in which sensationalism lurks just around the corner. Although this might be a popular pick for general public library collections, it shouldn't be a first (or even second) choice to cover the subject. Aud: H, C, P. (G. Handman)