''The Exonerated," a plea against the death penalty, exudes honesty. It contains only brightly lit actors against a wall of blackness, delivering a series of charged monologues to the camera. Like A.R. Gurney's ''Love Letters," the epistolary play, or like the Scandinavian Dogma films, it eschews the distractions of scenery in order to cut straight to the emotional core of the piece. It asks us to listen to the words closely, to visualize what we're hearing, to steep ourselves in the subjectivity of the characters. During this sparely filmed docudrama, eye candy comes only in the form of angry stares, furrowed brows, and heads shaking in disbelief.
Provocative film raises concerns on executions
Ironically, the six central characters in ''The Exonerated," which premieres tonight at 9 on Court TV, look as if they're facing hard questioning in ''the box" -- the cold, bare interrogation rooms on cop shows like ''NYPD Blue." In fact, each of them is no longer prey to the justice system, having been freed from death row after years -- in some cases decades -- of wrongful imprisonment. Kerry Max Cook (Aidan Quinn), for instance, spent 22 years awaiting execution for rape and murder until DNA evidence proved his innocence. And Robert Earl Hayes (David Brown Jr.) was released when hair found on his alleged rape and murder victim pointed to another suspect. They've all emerged from an American nightmare, relieved it's over but aware that its spiritual repercussions will never end.
The characters are based on real exonerated prisoners, and everything they say has been lifted from interviews and case files and then shaped into a script (by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, based on their off-Broadway production). Whether the stories exude truth as much as they exude honesty has been a topic of debate, as a few prosecutors have come forward to maintain skepticism about one or two of the freed convicts' innocence. But the controversy does nothing to compromise the intense drama of the movie, or its clear point -- that whether it's moral or not, capital punishment is vulnerable to mistakes. It's hard to imagine watching ''The Exonerated" and not thinking twice about the death penalty.
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