The German director Werner Herzog is a genius. His films range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and his documentaries are as powerful as his fictional movies. "Into the Abyss," which opens today, is a tale of death row in Texas, and Herzog is interviewing a man who was sentenced to die only eight days after their conversation. And did.
In 2001, in the dusty little town on Conroe, Tex., Michael Perry and Jason Burkett saw a red Camaro they wanted to drive, so they stole it, and while doing so, they killed Sandra Stotler, her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson.
They were caught soon thereafter, tried and convicted as each busily tried to blame the other. Perry was sentenced to death; Burkett to life in prison.
Herzog interviews them, and some others who were linked to the case, and the result is amazing stuff. Speaking plainly and bluntly, waiting patiently for responses, he has come up with a brilliant film, regardless of your stand on capital punishment. This is not a story about the rights and wrongs of the death penalty; it's a series of interviews: With a man who knows his time remaining on earth will be brief, and another who will be spending the rest of his life in prison, and some others affected by the crime, like the sister of the boy who was killed, and the supervisor of the room where another boy will be killed, and another prisoner, who happens to be the father of the boy in prison for life.
The red Camaro? Well, while it's been sitting in a police parking lot in Conroe, a tree has grown up through its floorboards.
The film shows an influence of "In Cold Blood," the Truman Capote masterpiece about senseless killings and their results, but Herzog's style, as an interviewer and as a filmmaker, is different from that of director-screenwriter Richard Brooks.
Herzog does not make a statement on capital punishment, but his feelings show. He is hard and blunt with the killers, gentle in a lengthy interview with Lisa Stotler-Balloun, whose mother and brother died in the shooting, close to that with Burkett's father, who accepts the blame for the fact that his son became a murderer, and when asked what he had accomplished in prison, replies simply, "I learned to read."
Perhaps saddest of all is the interview with Fred Allen, who supervises the excution from ordering the condemned man's last meal to tightening the straps around his legs on the gurney where he will die. Allen notes that he has supervised 125 executions, but not long after the interview, he supervised the execution of a woman, Carla Faye Tucker, then suddenly resigned, giving up part of his pension.
Into the Abyss opens today at the Tivoli
— Joe