STUDIO: IFC Films
RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2008 (and on IFC on May 23, 2008)
DIRECTED BY: Peter Gilbert and Steve James
GENRE: Documentary
RATING: NR

"And then there are the others that I know are not guilty of the crime for which they were put to death."

Those are powerful words from anyone, but even more so from the man who says them in At the Death House Door, the Reverend who gave last rites to hundreds of men at Huntsville State Prison in Texas, Reverend Carol J. Pickett. The brilliant documentarians who gave the world Hoop Dreams have turned their cameras on to the fascinating story of Reverend Pickett, who started his career at Huntsville shortly before the death penalty was reinstated. He was there at the first lethal injection, one that he now admits no one was sure how it would exactly go. He walked horrible men through the last minutes of their lives, including the one who brutally killed two of his parishioners. Think about that. This man had to identify the bodies of two people he cared deeply about and then comfort the man who killed them in the moments before his death. I don't know about you, but it takes a better man than me to be able to do something that forgiving.

Pickett is a fascinating character, even if the documentary never quite takes off to become as truly transcendental as you hope it will. It's a good-not-great film that vacillates between character study (with a lot of biography and history on Pickett) and commentary on the entire institution of capital punishment. It feels like the structure, which moves back and forth between a few cases and interviews with Pickett and his family, is a bit off, but this man's story is definitely one worth hearing. The film plays at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago from May 10th-14th and airs on IFC on May 23rd.

As a journalist says in At the Death House Door, "If they get it wrong in 1/10th of 1% that's still thousands of people." That's always been my reasoning for being against the death penalty - we can't get it right. I don't trust our government to do a lot of things, much less be able to hold life and death in their hands. There have simply been too many cases where innocent people have died and Reverend Pickett undeniably held the hand of men who should not be killed moments before the state took his life. There's SO much there in terms of storytelling for a documentary filmmaker, but James and Gilbert sometimes lose their way. Just as At the Death House Door is really starting to click, they'll go off on a tangent like an extended series about Pickett's work with the jail choir. The idea is clearly to try and make Pickett a fully-realized, three-dimensional person for the viewer. They need to know who he was outside of that death chamber, but it doesn't work. Pickett is a great interview subject and we know he's not just a prison worker without the choir footage, which takes up far too much of the running time. There's an amazing scene where Pickett sits with his family and talks about moments when he knew what he was doing was wrong, like when he started to see mentally retarded people in the chamber. It's unbelievably powerful and Death House would have been a better film if that power could have been maintained. It's interesting to hear from a reporter who interviewed a clearly innocent man on death row and was his last phone call, but there's enough story in Pickett that we could have stayed with him for 90 minutes.

Honestly, At the Death House Door makes me wish someone would write a book about the life of Reverend Carol J. Pickett, where the tangential stuff like his work with the choir wouldn't be as damaging to the pacing of the piece as a whole. His story is, in many ways, the American story of the death penalty. He came from a background where murder impacted his family and his parish and he believed in an eye for eye, as most of the country did. But Pickett became more and more convinced that the inmates who told him they were innocent truly were. When Pickett tells two Chicago Tribune reporters that he sometimes thinks he should have spoken up earlier about injustices, it's a powerful moment. And it's not the only one in the film, a documentary that feels even more relevant with the upcoming Supreme Court discussion of lethal injection in June. It's a discussion that has been out of the public eye with all the stories about Iraq, gas, and the craziest election season ever. This film could go a long way toward bringing back front and center.