The Last Hangman (UK, director Adrian Shergold): Between 1933 and 1955, Albert Pierrepoint was Britain’s Chief Executioner, responsible for more than 600 hangings. Timothy Spall gives a devastating performance as a decent man engaged in the loneliest of professions. The title is somewhat misleading. Hangings were carried out until 1964, but Pierrepoint was the last man to hold the official office of Chief Executioner.

As the film begins, Pierrepoint is proud to be offered a job as a hangman, following in his father’s and uncle’s footsteps. Since he’s only needed every few months, he maintains his job as a grocer’s deliveryman and keeps his moonlighting a secret from his friends and even his wife (Juliet Stevenson). He is very good at his new profession, and is determined to complete each job as quickly and humanely as possible. It’s a bit odd seeing him trying to shave seconds off the time required for each execution, much like a professional athlete trying for a world record. That is, until you realize that his desire is for the prisoner to have as little time as possible to be afraid. After each execution, it falls to Pierrepoint to cut down the body and prepare it for burial, and it’s touching to see the tenderness he displays. After the execution of one woman, he tells his assistant, “She’s paid the price, now she’s innocent.”

Pierrepoint’s reputation grows and after the war, he’s flown to Germany by the British Army and placed in charge of executing scores of Nazi war criminals. As a result, his secret is leaked to the press, who now broadcast his identity as the finest hangman in the land. With his earnings from these jobs, he and his wife decide to open a pub(!), which does a booming business, thanks in part to his notoriety.

But the job begins to take a terrible toll. Even after he tells his wife about his second profession, she doesn’t want to hear about it. Nobody really wants to hear about it. When protestors start demonstrating against capital punishment, Pierrepoint finds himself the target of their ire. Doubts begin to creep in to destroy his previously unshakable faith in what he does. By the mid-1950s, Albert Pierrepoint resigns his position (ostensibly over unpaid fees) and completely reverses his own position on capital punishment, though he initially keeps his opinions to himself. In his 1974 autobiography, however, he finally confesses that the whole experience had left a bitter aftertaste for him and that he felt that capital punishment had “achieved nothing but revenge.”

Though this is a fairly standard biopic and “issue film,” the performances of Juliet Stevenson and especially Timothy Spall are remarkable. Pierrepoint’s determination to remain detached takes a terrible toll on his life and is bound to fail eventually. The obvious conclusion is that killing corrodes our humanity, whether the killer is a murderer or an executioner on the state’s payroll.

Note: This film was retitled Pierrepoint upon its release.

More on Albert Pierrepoint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Pierrepoint

(8/10)

Workingman’s Death (Austria/Germany, director Michael Glawogger): After you see this film, you’ll never complain about your job again. Subtitled something like “Five Portraits of Work in the Twenty-First Century,” Glawogger’s documentary features some of the most dangerous, difficult, or just plain unpleasant work in the world.

Each segment except the last one is about twenty-five minutes long, and is shot without any voiceover narration and very little editorializing. We are simply presented with people working and talking about their work. The director possesses a very painterly sense of composition, and we’re often presented with shots of workers posing as if they were in front of a still camera. The camerawork is even more impressive when it is moving, and I often found myself wondering how they were able to film in some of these conditions.

The segments follow, in order, a group of miners in Ukraine who have dug their own coal shafts, a group of men in Indonesia who collect sulfur from an active volcano and haul it down the mountainside, butchers at an open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria, men who break apart rusting ships for scrap metal in Pakistan, and steelworkers in China. Although all of these workers are merely surviving, the thing that struck me most was how contented, even happy, most of them were.

That being said, three of the five segments featured Islamic societies, and I found myself wondering about the connections between the conditions these men were working in and the rise of Islamic radicalism. Among the shipbreakers in Pakistan, for instance, there was an interesting segment which followed a photographer who circulated among the men charging them a fee to take pictures of them holding an assault rifle. There was no voiceover, but I got the impression that these men wanted to be seen as revolutionaries instead of just subsistence scrap workers.

The most intense segment had to be among the butchers, and there was quite a lot of blood and gore evident as we watched the men work. But strangely, I found this a more honest approach to the production of food than I saw in the factory farms in We Feed The World. These butchers are “hands-on,” literally.

The final segment, filmed among steelworkers in China, was the shortest, and the least interesting, but the director was trying to end with the optimism of the Chinese workers for the steel industry, which he contrasts with shots of a defunct steel mill in Germany that’s been turned into an art installation. His point was slightly unclear, but overall, his unflinching eye for detail, even in some harrowing work environments, makes this documentary a must-see.

(9/10)

Citizen Dog (Thailand, director Wisit Sasanatieng): I’d heard some buzz around this film, that it was sort of a Thai Amelie. In fact, it’s Amelie cranked up to 11. Which is entirely too much. This film is absolutely overstuffed with whimsy. A narrator tells us the story of country boy Pod, who comes to Bangkok to find work and falls in love with Jin. Along the way, he loses and then finds his finger, drives around a chainsmoking talking teddy-bear as well as a man who licks everything, and shares his house with a gecko that has the face of his dead grandmother. If that’s not enough, the object of his desire is an obsessive neat freak who carries around a book written in Italian that she can’t read. A case of mistaken identity sends her off on an environmental crusade that results in her accumulating a mountain (literally, a mountain) of plastic water bottles. Will this pair find love in the end? Well, by the end, I didn’t care that much.

The problem was that the visual tricks and whimsy overwhelm the characters, who end up being nothing more than a collection of quirks. The constant voiceover also never really lets the characters tell their own stories, and the romance never feels believable.

Sasanatieng is obviously a director of huge talent, and there are quite a few great sight gags and some really original visuals. But there’s just far too much of it. It’s like eating a whole chocolate cake at one sitting. If he could tone down the trickery a bit, and find a story with real characters, he could one day make a really outstanding film. This isn’t it yet, but I hope he does it. I’m giving this 6.5, though my graphic below doesn’t show halves.

(6.5/10)

Twelve And Holding (USA, director Michael Cuesta): Ostensibly about a group of friends, this film tells three separate tales that veer from comedy to tragedy and back again. I’ll sketch them in the order of most successful to least.

Malee lives with her mom and never sees her dad. She’s just started her period and begins to develop a very strong crush on a construction worker who is one of her therapist mother’s patients. Her attempts at flirting are both painful and very funny to watch. She’s obviously missing a father figure, but there’s something else stirring as well, and she’s lonely and looking for adult attention. Zoe Weizenbaum was just a joy to watch, beautiful and earnest and lovable and willing to take amazing risks for the film. The director told us to watch out for her as “Young Pumpkin” in the upcoming Memories of a Geisha.

Leonard is an overweight kid from a family where everyone is overweight, and he’s tired of being the butt of other people’s jokes. After a serious accident in which (bizarrely) he loses his senses of taste and smell, he starts eating healthy food and exercising, and takes radical action to, as he sees it, save his mother’s life. Played soulfully by Jesse Camacho, Leonard is never just comic relief, but a hurting little boy who wants to change not only his life, but his family’s as well.

Jacob (Conor Donovan) and Rudy (also played by Conor Donovan) are twin brothers who are very different from each other. Rudy is athletic and fearless, Jacob withdrawn and shy, mostly because of a large birthmark on his face. One night, Rudy and Leonard stay overnight in their treehouse, after bullies threaten to destroy it. Their plan to stay awake and defend it goes horribly wrong when they doze off, and the bullies light it on fire, unaware that anyone is inside. Leonard escapes with relatively minor injuries (but as noted above, the odd side effect that he can no longer smell or taste). But Rudy is killed, and his family is devastated. Jacob is racked with guilt for not being with the others on the night of the fire, but he’s also filled with a desire for revenge. After the two perpetrators are sent away to a juvenile facility for a year, Rudy and Jacob’s mother expresses her wish that the guilty pair die, a sentiment that Jacob stores away in his heart.

For a while, Jacob goes to the juvenile facility regularly to threaten the two, telling them that when they get out, he’s going to kill them. But after one of the boys commits suicide in custody, Jacob softens and even continues to visit the other boy and bring him comic books. As the boy’s release looms, they make a plan to run away together. Jacob is unhappy at home, feeling unwanted due to the arrival of a new adopted child. But his plans lead to even more tragedy.

If all this sounds melodramatic, it is. And despite the heavy subject matter, at times there was a vaguely “after-school special” feeling about the film. This last story, which in some ways ties the others together, carries the most weight, but is the least successful. I’m not sure why, but it may have something to do with the huge dramatic burden placed on the shoulders of a young actor with little experience. The fact that the film careens through a wide emotional territory like a drunken elephant doesn’t help, either.

In the end, the performances of Camacho and Weizenbaum are so winning that I sort of wish they were in a film of their own. As a story of three kids seeking the love of their parents, the film is only partially successful. I also wish the kids had been in more scenes together, since you don’t really get to see why they’re friends in the first place. I’m giving this 7.5, though my graphic below doesn’t show halves.

(7.5/10)