Tim Robbins directed a script he adapted from Helen Prejean's book. He got an Oscar nom but no gong, riding his The Shawshank Redemption (1994) wave. Lead and his partner-at-the time Susan Sarandon plays a nun and got Oscared. She does work hard here. Second bean Sean Penn got a nom but no gong; does he do his best work in the penn? Fellow jailbird Clancy Brown puts in a effective cameo as a state trooper. Robert Prosky (Thief (1983), Broadcast News (1987)) does what he can as a talky lawyer. R. Lee Ermey! Jack Black! IMDB trivia suggests that the entire Robbins clan was in there somewhere.
Penn is on death row somewhere not too far from Slidell in Louisiana for the rape and murder of a young couple. For reasons I didn't perceive he writes to nun Sarandon and she responds in a witness/soul-saving sort of way. There are some auxiliary legal efforts to get his execution commuted that are shown to be ineffectual. She spends some time with the parents of the victims. It loses momentum in the final act as the redemption-in-Christ parts are interspersed with flashbacks of the crime.
Robbins is well-known to have liberal views and this made me feel that he was often trying to have it both ways; others may read this as even-handedness but his gestures at the Bible (essentially the New Testament against the Old) and the politics of capital punishment are shallow, manipulative cop outs. The music gets rough at times: Eddie Vedder over the opening credits, indecipherably, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and possibly Peter Gabriel in the middle, and an Oscar nom for Bruce Springsteen for the song over the closing credits.
For all that it is far better than Eastwood's later True Crime (1999).
Roger Ebert: four stars. Despite his denials option 3 (religious conversion) is roughly what we get. A Critic's Pick by Janet Maslin. Both were hugely impressed with Penn's performance.
