Word: poncelet
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...know where Tim Robbins, its writer-director, stands on the issue of capital punishment. Considering that there is no more tendentious topic available to a filmmaker, Robbins' restraint, his determination to explore the moral and psychological nuances of the relationship that develops between Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), a man condemned to death for his participation in a heinous crime, and Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), who becomes his spiritual counselor in his final months, is exemplary...
Cases don't come any harder than Poncelet's. His drifting life reaches its nadir when, with another man, he commits a lovers' lane rape and double murder, steadfastly (and unpersuasively) insisting that he did not commit the killings. There is about him an inchoate rage tempered, if that's the word we want, by self-pity and a certain raw intelligence, which has led him to jailhouse lawyering and several stays of execution. It is largely the latter quality, and the challenging seductiveness of his manner, that leads Sister Helen to see in him the possibilities of redemption...
Cases don't come any gentler than hers. She is a woman of solid middle-class background. If anything, she has been more mysteriously called to a life caring for the marginal than Poncelet has been to his life of darkness. All we really know about her is that her moral courage is matched by her moral acuity. She opens herself up not just to the condemned man but also to the families of his victims, thereby squaring the movie's moral drama. Whatever she may think about the brutal finality of capital punishment, she cannot deny the anguish...
Sister Helen can find only limited possibilities for mercy in this situation. Perhaps if Poncelet can be persuaded to admit his full complicity in the crime, he will find some peace, some honor, in his final moments. Perhaps if he does so, the victims' families will find a closure more consoling than revenge...
...Libreville, Gabon's capital, for hours to prepare for a landing by Free French forces under General René de Larminat, Chief of Staff of the French Army in Syria before France fell. The British denied any shelling, but said they had forced the ocean-going French submarine Poncelet to be scuttled off Gabon. Vichy said Libreville's attackers, who landed on both sides of the town and surrounded it, were French colonial troops from garrisons in Equatorial Africa, led by "criminal former officers." They had some bombers and made things hot for defenders under General Tenu...
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