Clemency
“Clemency ‘shows’ rather than ‘tells’ its inclusive tenets.”
Title: Clemency (2019)
Director: Chinonye Chukwu 👩🏾🇳🇬🇺🇸
Writer: Chinonye Chukwu 👩🏾🇳🇬🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 5/5
When Clemency first held its world premiere at Sundance this year, writer-director Chinonye Chukwu made history as the first Black woman to win the prestigious Grand Jury Prize for a U.S. Dramatic entry. Fast-forward nine months, and I finally caught Clemency at Toronto International Film Festival and was able to see for myself how a grim movie about capital punishment in America could capture the hearts of audiences everywhere.
The surgical, spare, and haunting tone of Chukwu’s film belies a lush interiority. Minimalist dialogue and sound effects echo off the concrete of Sybil Brand Institute, the disused prison where much of the film was shot. Against this backdrop, audiences follow Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard), a warden who struggles with the moral weight of administering the death penalty. By the time we meet Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), a wrongfully convicted inmate, Bernadine has overseen 11 executions with each subsequent one further eroding her sense of self.
Despite such bleak material, Woodard infuses the film with humanistic depths. Every weary sigh or far-off gaze provides a conduit into relatable and universal experiences—loneliness, trauma, or the difficulty of connecting with loved ones through the fog of depression. Through such emotions, Chukwu deftly carves an entry point into the expansive topic of capital punishment.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, but barely
For a film that centers a female lead, Clemency casts primarily men: death row inmate Woods, his well-meaning lawyer Marty Lumetta (Richard Schiff), prison chaplain Kendricks (Michael O'Neill), and Bernadine’s husband Jonathan Williams (Wendell Pierce) all pad out the film’s starring and supporting roles.
In addition, Clemency lacks specificity to life as a woman, particularly through its reticence on Bernadine’s unique position of being a Black woman in charge of a male prison. At times, I found it distractingly idealistic to watch the inmates and Bernadine’s subordinates—all of them men, and mostly white—fall in line and treat her with the utmost deference. Pleasant to watch? Sure. But for a hard-hitting film like Clemency, this respite felt almost more like intentional avoidance. Her character could have been swapped for a white male lead, and the world around her would have treated her no differently.
But while Clemency skirts outside the usual ways a film scores full marks on the representation of women, the components that do work are absolutely integral and impressive. For starters, Clemency boasts a female writer and director in a landscape where just 4 directors of the 1,200 top films in the last decade were Black women. (Yes, you read that right—four among a thousand two hundred directors.) Furthermore, Chukwu drills down for miles into the psyche of its female lead, mining enough introspection to spread out over an entire freestanding cast of characters. Woodard’s incredible performance packs an outsized punch. What the film may structurally lack in the number of roles for women or the explicit tackling of women’s issues, she makes up for tenfold in sheer complexity.
Race: 5/5
Given its Nigerian-American filmmaker and the inextricable nature of race and incarceration, it’s no surprise that Clemency delivers in this category.
Similar to the way it “shows” rather than “tells” feminist tenets, Clemency also refrains from speaking on race but its cues can seen everywhere. This is no more visible than through the casting of Hodge, a dark-skinned Afro-Latino actor, in the role of an innocent victim. Contrary to the way American law enforcement targets Black men, where even children are perceived as older and guiltier than white counterparts, Chukwu defiantly rebukes this real world indignity through the effective platform of Hodge’s guilelessness and bambi eyes.
Mediaversity Grade: A+ 5/5
A winner at Sundance and a winner at Mediaversity, Clemency easily sails through our metrics of inclusion based on the strength of performances by Woodard and Hodge.
Wider audiences will soon get a shot at experiencing this moving drama and commentary on the justice system for themselves. Clemency comes out in theaters December 27...just in time to make the Oscar deadline, if the Academy will do right by Woodard and hand her a deserving Best Actress win.
Like Clemency? Try these other titles that comment on the prison industrial complex.
When They See Us (2019)
The Hate U Give (2018)
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