Into the Abyss – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/01/into-the-abyss-review-herzog

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Many film-makers cut their teeth directing documentaries before moving on to features. Relatively few continue making them in tandem with their fiction work. Louis Malle is perhaps the most notable example of a director who did, and there is a fascinating and fruitful interplay between the two aspects of his career stretching from his first movie, Le Monde du silence, the film of marine exploration he co-directed with Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1956, to his final film, Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994, where it is hard to say whether it's a documentary about an Andre Gregory production of Chekhov in New York or a fictional film built around the play.

Born a decade after Malle and a key member of the German new wave that followed the French one, Werner Herzog's career has taken him along a similar path. And he's not only made fiction films and documentaries, he's also figured in several films, most famously Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, an account of Herzog shooting Fitzcarraldo up the Amazon. His new film, Into the Abyss, is a documentary exploring the subject of capital punishment, a major concern of the cinema for nearly a century now. Most of what many of us know about the subject comes from seeing it treated seriously in Griffith's Intolerance (1916), comically in The Front Page (1931), and forensically in A Short Film About Killing (Kieslowski's 1988 film that led to the abolition of the death penalty in Poland), and from suffering along with James Cagney, Richard Burton, Susan Hayward, Diana Dors, Miranda Richardson and Sean Penn as they wait on death row to walk the last mile.

At the centre of Herzog's arresting picture is a triple murder in the small Texas city of Conroe, 20 miles north of Houston. In 2001, two blue-collar teenagers, Michael James Perry and Jason Aaron Burkett, under the influence of drink and drugs, murdered a middle-aged housewife, Sandra Stotler, in her kitchen while she was baking cookies. They wanted the keys to her car. They then phoned her stepson and his friend, with whom they were acquainted, to get the code that would enable them to drive out of the gated community in which she lived. They killed them too and disposed of the bodies. Several days later, after a shoot-out with the police, the killers were arrested, confessed and were convicted. Herzog subtitles his film "A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life" for a variety of reasons, one being that Perry was sentenced to death while Burkett was given life because his father, a habitual criminal himself serving life, brought tears to women jurors with his tale of family woe.

Anyone who has seen Herzog on television or presenting one of his documentaries will know how manic, mysterious and apocalyptic he can be, and in the context of Into the Abyss it's difficult not to remember the moment in Burden of Dreams when he recalls pulling a revolver on his star, Klaus Kinski, and threatening to shoot him if he walked off the set. But he's here at his most sober, talking quietly, declaring early on that he's adamantly opposed to capital punishment but isn't making a polemical film, and remaining out of shot, putting questions from behind the camera. He's imposed a strict form on his picture, dividing it into a prologue and six chapters, each with sonorous titles such as "The Dark Side of Conroe" and "The Protocols of Death".

The film begins with Richard Lopez, chaplain at Huntsville, the Texas state penitentiary that houses death row, talking unsentimentally about his job of accompanying prisoners to the gurney on which they're strapped down to receive the lethal injection. He's photographed in the cemetery where unclaimed bodies are buried with numbers instead of names on their crosses. The film ends with moving testimony from the stocky, bearded Fred Allen, who sits in front of an old clock that stands above a shelf bearing a wooden sculpture spelling out the word "Dream" carved out of a block of wood, and talks about resigning after attending more than 120 executions as the captain of Huntsville's death row. These were a few of the record-breaking 152 executions carried out while George W Bush was governor. Allen learned from a friend to think of living for that "dash" – the line between the dates of your birth and death on your gravestone that represents your life.

In between, Herzog is shown official crime-scene footage and is escorted around Conroe by a local cop. He interviews the killers (both now proclaiming their innocence), a couple of locals with bad memories of them, two relatives of the dead woman, and a woman who married the imprisoned Burkett and was inseminated by him via (it's hinted) "contraband" semen smuggled out of jail. This death-row groupie became convinced of his innocence by the appearance of a rainbow over the jail. A tree has grown up inside the victim's car during the decade it has stood in the parking lot behind the police station. Such odd incidents abound in the bizarre, drifting world of the people involved in this case, which is as messy, if less symmetrical as regards the relationship between victims and perpetrators, than that not-dissimilar one recreated by Truman Capote in In Cold Blood. Dr Johnson said that when a man knows he's about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. You could say the same about watching a film about a man waiting to be hanged.